The 1974 banned Moroccan film “About Some Meaningless Events” is streaming again after being discovered in 2016 in the archives of Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona by researcher Lea Morin.
The Moroccan film started showing “in exclusivity” this week on the streaming platform MUBI, as part of the “Rediscovered Series.”
“About Some Meaningless Events” is a 76-minutes Docu-fiction film by Moroccan director Mostafa Derkaoui; it was shown only once in Paris in 1975.
Morocco’s government banned the film after its first and only screening, saying it was inappropriate for the Moroccan audience.
The politically contentious film tackles independent national cinema’s social role and the political aspirations of a new generation. The film was long believed to have been lost, until the discovery of a negative print in 2016.
The film tells a story of a group of filmmakers gathering in a Casablanca bar to discuss national cinema’s role in Morocco’s society, then moving to ask people around the bar and in the streets about their inputs and what they think of Moroccan cinema.
While interviewing passersby, the filmmakers and the shooting crew receive multiple, contrasting answers.
Some of the answers the directors received were “Moroccan cinema should focus on employment;” ‘it should address the “working-class problems;” “I am too busy with work to watch movies;” and “Go make Moroccan cinema, then come back to me to talk about it.”
During their interviews, the crew follows a man on a motorbike to ask him the same questions, in which he only answers “realistic scenes and goes to sit alone.
The filmmakers’ attention quickly changes in the film when a worker accidentally kills his boss who was exploiting him and taking most of his wage.
The incident leads to more conversation and debate between the group discussing the worker’s motives for killing his boss and what is right or wrong.
“About some meaningless events” takes its audience through the director’s filming journey, confusing them with which scenes are a reconstruction of real events and which ones are fiction, while discussing art and politics.
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