Moumen Smihi | |
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Born | 1945 (age 78–79) |
Nationality | Moroccan |
Occupations |
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Notable work | Si Moh, pas de chance |
Moumen Smihi (born 1945 in Tangier) is a Moroccan filmmaker. His career spans more than four decades, during which he has written, produced and directed award-winning and influential feature films, short films and documentaries. He is considered to be a seminal member of the "new Arab cinema", [1] which began to flourish in the 1970s. Its proponents, inspired by political and artistic concerns, and similar to Italy's New Realism, France's Nouvelle Vague, and the US independent and underground movements, worked outside of the studio systems of Hollywood and Egypt, where business incentives dictated form and content.
Smihi has taught and lectured at Paris 8 University and at UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies. He has traveled extensively in Greece, France, Italy and in the Middle East, and has lived and worked in Egypt. Today, he divides his time between Tangier and Paris. His production company, IMAGO Film International, founded in 1979, has produced some twenty films and edited books on film theory.
As World War II was drawing to a close, Smihi was born into a religious Muslim family living in the cosmopolis of Tangier. The city, which from 1923 had the status of an "International zone" governed by France, Spain and Great Britain (with the addition of Italy in 1926), was about to undergo a process of restoration to full sovereignty that, after a period of Spanish control from 1940 to 1945 during World War II, culminated in 1956 with the signing of the Tangier Protocol.
Although the men of Smihi's family had for generations been fquihs (Muslim ministers), Smihi's father insisted that his son attend a French secular school that was conducted in both French and Arabic. The Tangier of Smihi's childhood was home to some prominent Beat Generation writers and expats. Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg lived there and could often be found drinking mint tea and smoking kif (Moroccan marijuana) in the Zocco Chico square. They nurtured local artists such as Mohamed Choukri and Mohamed Mrabet, whose Big Mirror was later adapted by Smihi, with a screenplay by Paul Bowles, Gavin Lambert and Smihi. Egyptian, American and Spanish films were widely shown at the time and Smihi was a fervent moviegoer.
At the same time, Smihi was becoming profoundly influenced by Marxist theory. His friendship and discussions with prominent Moroccan Marxists lead him to a deeply felt and abiding desire to articulate cultural concerns and their political expression in his films. In 1964, he took part in the political student uprising in Rabat that was ferociously repressed by the Moroccan police and army.
In 1965, Smihi was awarded a scholarship by the French government and left Morocco for Paris to study filmmaking at IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques). He was influenced by the seminars of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévy-Strauss at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and particularly by Roland Barthes, with whom he worked on a memoir.
Smihi has cited the cinéma vérité pioneer Jean Rouch and Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, whom he met at the Francophone Film Festival, as being among those who imparted to him a sense of the magic of movies.
Paris was undergoing its own "revolution" in 1968 which further fueled Smihi's imaginings of an Arab "patria grande". A constant in his work is an emphasis on the interrelationships between his fictional characters, the Arab culture and its history — which Smihi views critically as permeated with decadence and colonial influence.
His first short film, Si Moh Pas de Chance (The Unlucky Man) portrayed the miserable conditions of North African immigrant workers in Europe. It was shot in France and won the Grand Prize at the Festival International d'Expression Française in Dinard (1971). This film, along with Wechma by his friend Hamid Benani, was presented at the Swiss Film Archive by Freddy Buache, who praised them as heralding "the birth of Moroccan cinema."
It was in Morocco in 1975 that Smihi produced and directed his prize-winning first feature El Chergui (The East Wind), which was highly regarded in Europe and Africa and received enthusiastic reviews in Le Nouvel Observateur, Jeune Afrique, The International Herald Tribune2 and elsewhere. Also titled The Violent Silence, the film uses the story of a woman threatened by her polygamist husband to speak of a repressed and silenced Morocco.
His second feature, The Tales of the Night, won the Venezia Genti Prize at the Mostra of Venezia in 1985.3 Here, Smihi's filmmaking language is manifest: weaving together while teasing apart the threads of realism, poetry and the principles of "text theory"; a refusal of the structures of "ideological discourse", thus allowing the strength and the independence of the esthetic material to emerge.4
In the 1980s, Smihi began to seek French and international co-productions resulting in French television companies producing a number of his films. During this period, he traveled widely in Greece, France, Italy and the Middle East presenting his films at festivals. He also became interested in psychoanalytic theory which began to influence his work.
In 1987, he made The Big Mirror, which portrayed both the rise of the middle class in Morocco and the delirium generated by King Hassan's censorship, under which filmmakers were obliged to use a language replete with oblique references and hidden meanings.5
In 1988 Smihi moved to Cairo where, through the director Salah Abu Seif, he met Naguib Mahfouz, with whom he planned an adaptation of Mahfouz's novel Autumn Quail. During this period, Smihi directed two films in three years, Defending the Egyptian Cinema and The Lady from Cairo, the latter, the story of a woman who wants to be free and modern in an Egypt overwhelmed by terrorism.
In 1993 Smihi narrated, appeared and directed the documentary, With Matisse in Tangier which chronicles Henri Matisse's work and its relationship to Morocco. [2]
For the past ten years Smihi has been working on an autobiography from which he adapted the screenplays of his last two features, A Muslim Childhood in 2005 (nominated at the Fifth Marrakech International Film Festival) and Of Virgins And Swallows (2008) both about his native Tangier.
In the documentary With Taha Hussein (2015), Smihi pays homage to the work of the Egyptian writer recounting Hussein's importance to Arab culture. [3]
Year | Title | English Title | Credited as | Notes | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Director | Screenwriter | Producer | ||||
1970 | Si Moh, pas de chance | Simoh, the Unlucky Man | Yes | Yes | No | Short film |
1972 | Couleurs aux corps | Colours of the Body | Yes | Yes | No | Short documentary |
1975 | El Chergui ou le Silence vilent (Charqi Aw al-Çoumt al-‘Anif ) | El Chergui/The Violent Silence/The East Wind | Yes | Yes | No | |
1981 | Quarante-quatre ou les récits de la nuit | Forty-Four or Tales of the Night | Yes | Yes | No | short film |
1987 | Caftan d’amour (Qaftan al-Hubb) | The Big Mirror | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
1991 | Sayidat al-Qahira /La dame du Caire | The Lady from Cairo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Co-written with Bashir El Deek |
1989 | al-Sinima al-Misriya (Défense et illustration du cinéma égyptien) | Defending the Egyptian Cinema | Yes | No | No | Television documentary |
1993 | Avec Matisse à Tanger | With Matisse in Tangier | Yes | Yes | No | Television documentary |
1999 | Waqa’i maghribia/Chroniques marocaines | Moroccan Chronicles | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
2005 | El ayel | A Muslim Childhood | Yes | Yes | No | |
2008 | Les Hirondelles: les Cris de jeunes filles des hirondelles | Girls and Swallows | Yes | Yes | No | |
2012 | Tanjaoui | The Sorrows of a Young Tangerian | Yes | Yes | No |
Youssef Chahine was an Egyptian film director. He was active in the Egyptian film industry from 1950 until his death. He directed twelve films included in a list of Top 100 Egyptian films published by the Cairo International Film Festival. A winner of the Cannes 50th Anniversary Award, Chahine was credited with launching the career of actor Omar Sharif. A well-regarded director with critics, he was often present at film festivals during the earlier decades of his work. Chahine gained his largest international audience as one of the co-directors of 11'9"01 September 11 (2002).
Mohamed Choukri was a Moroccan author and novelist who is best known for his internationally acclaimed autobiography For Bread Alone, which was described by the American playwright Tennessee Williams as "a true document of human desperation, shattering in its impact".
Ezz El-Dine Ahmed Mourad Zulficar was an Egyptian film director, screenwriter, actor and producer known for his distinctive style, which blends romance and action. Zulficar is widely regarded one of the most influential filmmakers in the golden age of Egyptian Cinema.
Arab cinema or Arabic cinema refers to the film industry of the Arab world. Most productions come from Egyptian cinema.
Cinema of Morocco refers to the film industry of Morocco. Aside from Arabic-language films, Moroccan cinema also produces Tamazight-language films. The first film in Morocco was shot by Louis Lumière in 1897. The first three Moroccan feature films were funded between 1968-1969. Most researchers and critics agree that the history of Moroccan cinema started with Hamid Bénani's Wechma (1970), which is recognised as the first cult movie in Moroccan film history, and received critical acclaim on an international scale. Until then films produced in the country were Moroccanised versions of Egyptian melodramas. Other influential Moroccan films include A Thousand and One Hands, which was the first feature length fiction film of the 1970s.
Window at Tangier; also referred to as La Fenêtre à Tanger, Paysage vu d'une fenêtre, and Landscape viewed from a window, Tangiers, is a painting by Henri Matisse, executed in 1912. It is held at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Jean-Louis Bory was a French writer, journalist, and film critic.
44 or Tales of the Night is a French-Moroccan film directed by Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi in 1981 and released in 1985.
Moroccan Chronicles is a 1999 Moroccan film directed by Moumen Smihi.
The Violent Silence is a 1975 film directed by Moumen Smihi. The film was screened at multiple international festivals and was a critical success.
Zanka Contact is a 2020 Moroccan film directed by Ismael El Iraki. Described as a Wild at Heart-type love story with debts to Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone, the film was inspired by El Iraki's emotional journey and recovery after he found himself in the midst of the horrors of the 2015 Bataclan attacks in Paris. Following a screening at the 77th Venice International Film Festival where the film's lead actress, Moroccan singer Khansa Batma, won the Venice Orizzonti Award for Best Actress, the film went on to be selected for over thirty international festivals and won several awards through its festival run 2020 to 2022. Among them, Zanka Contact was awarded the Golden Tutankhamun Award for best feature film at the Luxor African Film Festival.
Simoh, the Unlucky Man is a 1971 Moroccan short film by Moumen Smihi. It was shot in 16 mm, in black and white.
Avec Matisse à Tanger is a 1993 Moroccan documentary film directed by Moumen Smihi.
Virgins and Swallows is a 2008 Moroccan film directed by Moumen Smihi.
La dame du Caire is a 1991 Moroccan film directed by Moumen Smihi. It was filmed and produced in Egypt alongside Egyptian artists.
Caftan d'Amour (English: Caftan of Love or The Big Mirror) is a 1987 Moroccan film directed by Moumen Smihi.
A Muslim Childhood is a 2005 Moroccan film directed by Moumen Smihi. It was screened at the Marrakesh International Film Festival.
The Sorrows of a Young Tangerian is a 2013 Moroccan film directed by Moumen Smihi.
Doaa al-Karwan (The Call of the Curlew) is a novel by Taha Hussein, an Egyptian writer, published in 1934. Taha Hussein dedicated it to the writer Abbas Al-Akkad. The Lebanese poet Khalil Mutran was inspired to write a poem by the atmosphere of the novel. It was notable for containing the first use of flashback narrative in an Arabic-language novel.
Ezz El-Dine Zulficar Films Company is a film production company founded in Cairo by Ezz El-Dine Zulfikar and Salah Zulfikar in 1958. It operated in the Middle East and North Africa since 1958 until 1963.
2Nouvel Observateur, Paris, France, January 6, 1976; Jeune Afrique, Paris, France, January 21, 1976; International Herald Tribune, Paris, France, February 1976. 3 Lamalif, Casablanca, Morocco, 1981. 4 Cinema 76, Paris, France, January 1976. 5Die Welt, Berlin, Germany, 1989; La Repubblica, Rome, Italy, 1991.