De quelques évènements sans signification

A film crew makes its way around the streets of Casablanca interviewing all sorts of people. The questions are about cinema. What films do they watch? Do they usually watch films made in Morocco? What kind of cinema should Moroccan filmmakers make? There are many answers, often contradictory. At one point, the natural course of the investigation is cut short when one of the interviewees commits a crime. The team of filmmakers decides to focus its attention on the case and debate what position it should adopt.

Although the film appropriates documentary aesthetics, Derkaoui proposes a constant interplay of reality and fiction, of direct intervention in reality and staging. The film drifts between reportage, recreation, staging and making-of, erasing the boundaries between who represents and what is represented. In this sense, the film goes beyond a portrait of the Morocco of the time to explore what the role of artists and intellectuals should be in society and, specifically, question the limits of cinema as a political tool.

The film was screened just once in 1974 in Paris and was immediately censored by the Moroccan authorities of the time and removed from circulation. It was thought to be lost for almost 40 years until the negatives were found in the archive of the Filmoteca de Catalunya and restored as part of a collaboration project with the Atelier de l'Observatoire (Casablanca), involving Mostafa and Abdelkrim Derkaoui, and Léa Morin, an independent researcher.

De quelques évènements sans signification, Mostafa Derkaoui, 1975, 16 mm, 76’, Original version with Spanish subtitles.

The session will be presented by Rosa Cardona, responsible for the restoration of the film.

Acknowledgements: Filmoteca de Catalunya.