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Morocco World News
Fez, February 28, 2012
The city of Tetouan will host the 18th edition of the Mediterranean Film Festival which will take place March 24-31. This year’s edition will be characterized by a special program that tackles the issue of cinema and the Arab revolutions through the presentation of documentaries and the organization of discussions about the political uprisings in the region.
In this year’s competition, 16 countries will participate with 12 feature films, 15 short films, and 12 documentaries that represent the cultural diversity and the cinematographic richness of the Mediterranean area.
The festival will also honor eminent directors and actors in Mediterranean cinema who are representatives of the diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds of the region. The honored artists are: the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire, the Spanish actress, director and scriptwriter Iciar Bollain, the Italian actress Valeria Golino, the Egyptian actress Menna Chalabi, the Moroccan director Mohamed Ismael, the Moroccan actor Mohamed Majd, and the Tunisian actor Hicham Rostom.
There will also be special film screening sessions during the festival, among which include:
– Il était une fois en Anatolie, a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, France-Turkey, 2011,
– Source des femmes, a film by Radu Mihaileanu, France, 2011,
– Et maintenant on va où?, a film by Nadine Labaki,Lebanon , 2011,
– Andalousie mon amour, a film by Mohamed Nadif, Morocco , 2011
– Les hommes libres , a film by Ismael Farhouki , Morocco- France , 2011
– Terraferma, a film by Emanuele Crialese, Italy, 2011
– Cose dell’altro mondo, a film by Francesco Patierno, Italy, 2011
The festival will also hold round-table discussions dealing with two subjects, “The Image of the City of Tetouan and its Region in Moroccan Cinema” and “The Intellectual and Religious Elite of Tetouan and Cinema at the Beginning of the 20th Century”. On Sunday, March 25, a symposium will also be held under the theme “Cinema in the Digital Era” at 10 am at Kabila Hotel.
Among the questions that this symposium will raise are: what is digital cinema? What are its technical and artistic characteristics? How do the Mediterranean countries live this shift from what is known as traditional cinema to this innovative digital cinema? What are the consequences of this cinematic revolution on the content and constituents of traditional cinema? What will be the fate of cinemas which are already vanishing at an alarming rate? What roles will be assigned to film clubs/cinéclubs and other traditional channels of film? Is it possible that the digital system in Morocco can make filmmaking more accessible for people and not only preserved for a certain elite?
The participants in the symposium will be:
– Fassi Fehri Salim, President of the Moroccan Chamber of Producers
– Hamid Marrakchi, President of the Moroccan Chamber of Cinema Operators
– Nabil Ayouch, Director and Producer, Morocco
– Benkiran Najib, Distributor, Morocco
– Jean-Baptiste Hennion, Technical Manager of the Digital Cinema Department of 2AV
– Luke Pourrinet, Federation of Cinema Industries, of the audiovisual and multimedia-Ficam
– Antonietta De Lillo, Director, also a speaker at an interesting workshop on “Cinema and the Technological Revolution”
