Flo Martin Looks at Moroccan Cinema as a Transnational Player

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I would like to say that I’m a cinema fan, but I leave that to my sisters who are steeped in the craft and have well-defined perspectives that make for great family conversations, including our in-laws.  There is so much to enjoy in cinema today. The diversity, quality, and sometimes quirkiness of foreign films in particular make them quite engaging.

I can remember my university days when I was first exposed to films that had to have subtitles…strange experience for a small town teen from Western Pennsylvania. Today, international films have become a staple of film festivals all over the US, no longer confined to college campuses or arts cinemas. I­­t’s hard not to find films that satisfy, even if you’re not a critic or film buff. And, as I am learning, Moroccan films are among the best in Africa and the larger region.

The Middle East and North Africa were hotbeds of sophisticated (non-Bollywood genre) productions beginning in the 60s, with Lebanon leading the way to rival Egypt. It produced only a small number each year, but it became a center for film study, and today, six universities have cinema arts programs which trained many of the professionals who went on to start film centers in the Gulf. Most of the Arab film community today got their training in France or Lebanon.

As Wikipedia points out, “Films from Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestine, Syria and Tunisia are making wider and more frequent rounds than ever before in local film festivals and repertoire theaters.” In Washington, DC, where I live, there are at least three annual film festivals hosting Arab cinema productions and all are well attended.

So when a friend at Goucher College let me know that one of its professors, Dr. Florence (Flo) Martin was participating in a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (UK) grant to “analyze the rise of Moroccan cinema over the last two decades from relative obscurity to a position where it is arguably now amongst the most important national cinemas within Africa and the Arab world, ” I was intrigued.

So I set out to find out how someone from France, a Professor of French and Francophone Cinema and Literature from Goucher College iin nearby Baltimore, MD, became part of a film project in the UK.  So I contacted Dr. Martin, Flo, to find out about the project and her own interest in Morocco. She said that she came from Paris to Goucher where she had worked previously as a French assistant and instructor both at Goucher and at Randolph-Macon College. She created a Study Abroad Program in Paris for Randolph-Macon, which she directed for several years as she was completing her PhD dissertation.

Dr. Martin then spent a year at the University of Exeter (UK) directing Goucher College’s Study Abroad Program at the school, writing about Maghrebi cinema, and teaching French and Francophone Cinema Studies at Exeter. While there, she met Professor Will Higbee, Professor of Film Studies and French, who has a particular interest in immigrant, transnational, and diasporic cinemas, and has written several seminal books on North African cinema. Professor Higbee recruited Dr. Martin as his senior investigator for the AHRC grant.

On a Role

By this time, she has already written a paean to Bessie Smith followed by several articles and books on women in North Africa cinema, focusing on how their “revolutionary voices” were given new outlets by film. According to the AHRC website, “The project aims to explore the critical and commercial success of Moroccan cinema through a transnational lens, analyzing the global reach of this ‘small’ national cinema…The project places a strong emphasis on collaboration with filmmakers, festivals, policy makers and other industry figures and has partnerships with ESAV (Marrakech), the London Film School and The Africa in Motion Film Festival (Edinburgh),”

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Part of the project involves bringing together diverse players in film at a symposium at the Marrakech International Film Festival in December. Cinema professionals, critics, academics, and policy-makers will gather to exchange ideas that contribute to a deeper understanding of the project’s themes. As a prelude to the symposium, there was a competition for young filmmakers to submit two short films representative of their work. From 60 entries, two filmmakers will be chosen to spend a semester at the London School of Film Studies, where they will undertake collaborative work with others and become part of the School’s international network.

[A commercial interruption – The Marrakech festival, (FIFM) – was started in 2000 and has become one of the most prestigious events on the continent and Europe, drawing talent, directors, producers, critics, and film lovers from around the world. It is held every December.]

Dr. Martin describes Moroccan filmmakers as “agile,” able to collaborate with others in many countries to produce their films. And she believes that Moroccan cinema is currently “trying to figure out where it’s going.” It is “unique in that it speaks to global audiences and those at home in ways that are no longer encoded but are more direct and open, which is what caused the uproar over the Moroccan film ‘Much Loved.’ It was too raw, too direct for some.” [If you don’t know, the film was banned before it even made it into Morocco. It deals with the life of a prostitutes in Marrakech – read about it here.] She also listed “Adios Carmen,” which recounts in the Amazigh language the history of Tangier and northern Morocco, as emblematic of the new films that speak directly to audiences.

Earlier this year, Flo spent several months in Tangier working on her new book about Farida Benlyazid, an icon among filmmakers in Morocco, who introduced her to many young film aspirants who provided Dr. Martin with their perceptions of their craft and their country. Not one to slow down, Flo is already planning for the next steps after the symposium in Marrakech; after all, the grant is only for three years! Given her prodigious output so far, this project will define for quite some time the regional and transnational impact of Moroccan cinema.

 

Bill Murray at 15th Marrakech International Film Festival image from sg.entertainment.yahoo.com

When is a failed state not?

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I have to believe that one of the least favorite jobs in Washington is being an author or contributor to one of the annual reports that make you a target of unhappy embassies. Whether it’s from the roll call of State Department publications, which includes Human Rights Reports, International Religious Freedom Reports, Trafficking-in-Person Reports, Advancing Freedom and Democracy Reports, or those from NGOs such as Reporters without Borders, Amnesty International, The Heritage Foundation, or any of the dozens of other national and international reports used by the Millennium Challenge Corporation in its selection criteria, being the messenger is no easy task.

Over the past decade, there is a special place of skepticism reserved for the annual Failed States Index (FSI) published by the Fund for Peace, now in its ninth year and increasingly detailed and sophisticated. The title is a bit misleading as the report is not a predictive tool of state failure but rather an assessment of more than 100 internal factors that affect a country’s stability. Of course, since the data is based on the calendar year, the first yellow flag is what has occurred following the six months it takes to prepare the report that could affect a country’s ranking. The natural inclination is to look at a country’s rating and then compare it to others, breathing a sigh of either relief or exasperation. But that’s not where the substance is, and those who take the time to read the key indicators grouped into 12 categories can benefit from the extraordinary analytical efforts the FSI involves.

What makes the FSI useful

Why am I a fan?  Because I believe that the real benefit of FSI is as a tool to facilitate discussion among a country’s stakeholders about its ambitions, core values, and means of delivering credible governance and equitable opportunities. It is less important to be chagrined that the 2012 rankings have France and Portugal in better shape than the US, and more important to drill down into the social and economic indicators (demographic pressures, group grievance, refugees and Internally Displaced Persons, human flight and brain drain, uneven economic development, poverty and economic decline) and political and military indicators (state legitimacy, public services, human rights and law, security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention) to understand why.

In terms of methodology, the FSI relies on crunching tens of millions of pieces of information from around the world, which is then sorted into the 12 key indicators. “The content analysis is further triangulated with two other key aspects of the overall assessment process: quantitative analysis and qualitative inputs based on major events in the countries examined.” Final quality control is a review of the results and comparison with a “comprehensive set of vital statistics …as well as human analysis to ensure that the software has not misinterpreted the raw data.”

Lessons about state building

So what do we learn about state building from this year’s index? In the first instance, countries that work harder on capacity building over the long term are better able to withstand natural and man-made shocks that would drive weaker countries into crisis. It is a country’s ability to deliver a broad range of social services to greater numbers of its citizens while driving more equitable political participation that parallels the recommendations in the CFR report I mentioned last week.

Secondly, there are no magic bullets—not elections, not foreign assistance or intervention, nor increasing social benefits—that will reduce instability rooted in economic inequality, political marginalization, and degraded rule of law. Countries with large disparities in wealth, political access and influence, and public safety tend to be less stable than those that have fewer gaps (yes, Egypt was worse than Mali, but barely). In the section on the Arab Spring, it notes that the 2010 data “tells the story of a storm birthed in North Africa…indicators for Group Grievance and Human Rights were gradually and inexorably getting worse. In November 2010, there was a dramatic regional increase (not a good thing, the higher the score, the worse the ranking) in the State Legitimacy score…that has yet to come back down.”

Well, there may be a claim that this is all hindsight, and in fact the human analysis that is part of the process makes it inherently biased. Or one could take lessons from where the data and negative events have a high correlation, as in the example above, and draw analytical and policy lessons that increase our understanding of managing conflict before it become chaos or worse.

The FSI draws back the curtain on the complexities of state-building by enumerating the challenges, represented by the 100+ indicators that make up the profile of a country’s internal heartbeat. Rather than wait until the patient is in triage or functional failure, international donors and organizations can use this data and other sources to support dialogues with countries at risk to enable them to develop more robust strategies for reducing instability. Even isolated countries such as North Korea or far-away places like Somalia impact our lives. The FSI is a tool that helps us understand the caution flags that increasingly populate our mental maps of countries. It is this kind of solid data tied to the concurrence of values and interests that will enable policy makers and stakeholders to make the right choices.

Linking Communications & Development – One Professional’s Story

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Just spoke with Dr. Salmane El Allami, a professor at Mohammed V University who had attended a UN sponsored conference on how IT-facilitated development can help alleviate poverty. He was representing the Rhamna Foundation for Sustainable Development, which works to advance the lives of people living in the Rhamna region north of Marrakech. We started out talking about his background, and what emerged is a lesson in how even the smallest interactions can have great consequences.

He first came to the US in 1987 on a United States Information Service exchange program marking the 200th anniversary of the US-Morocco Friendship Treaty, our longest continuous treaty that is still in force. He was a university student who fell in love with English in high school and, unable to major in journalism or media at his university, took his degree in English literature. He stayed for six weeks, and it changed his life. Later, when pursuing his doctorate at the Sorbonne, he was struck by the lack of an area study of US-Arab relations. He received permission to do self-directed research on the topic of Arab Americans in the US, starting his field work in 1991. While in the DC metro area, he interviewed dozens of Arab Americans to better understand their integration into US society, and the role of religion in that transition. As importantly, he acquired knowledge in media and social-research techniques that became key to his career.

Much of our conversation focused on his study of the perceptions of Morocco’s National Human Development Initiative (INDH) and a follow up evaluation of INDH projects. INDH is a grassroots campaign launched by King Mohammed VI to build sustainable alternatives to the grinding poverty and lack of resources that afflict the hundreds of communities targeted by the program. It brings together stakeholders, government officials, the private sector, and NGOs to ascertain the challenges and the resources available, and then to bring together partners to develop solutions. This is what he has been doing both through his organization called Anfasse and also as a board member of the Rhamna Foundation.

And he has not left his love of media behind. When he moved to Mohammed V University, he started the Higher Institute of Information and Communication in Rabat to train young Moroccans in media. This year, he will launch a private effort called the All Media Development Training Center – a three-year program for media professionals to advance their craft and acquire skills in political communications, strategic communications, and similar specializations. He has also made a number of documentary films on subjects such as the crisis in Arab Higher Education, research in the Arab World, and the challenges of teaching and preserving Arabic. In addition, next month, he is taking his work on the road, bringing movies to rural areas where children have not been exposed to films, teaching them the essential skills of movie-making.

He sees all of this as inter-related – focusing on capacity-building for Moroccans to take charge of their lives and resources. He believes that this is the genius of INDH, “the most important development project in Morocco.” In the past, development programs lacked coherence, he says, with very little coordination, sporadic efforts, and no central strategy. Today’s INDH is based on firm principles of inclusion, sustainability, and a philosophy of development that puts people at the center of the projects. “We want them to learn how to do things on their own…it’s a paradigm shift that builds their capacity to positively affect their lives.” So there is a balance between government interventions and building up small businesses and other forms of income generation. For example, more than one million women have been affected by INDH since 2005.

Rhamna Foundation is a local partner for INDH and is focused on partners and stakeholders working together. Fortunately, Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), the world’s largest exporter of phosphates, has a major facility in the region. It is partnering with Rhamna to build the first green city in Morocco as well as participating in projects such as improving local schools and launching the Mohammed VI Polytechnic Institute to enhance marketable skills of local graduates.

Dr. El Allami is quite enthusiastic about the future. He believes that this innovative strategy of involving stakeholders in a detailed analysis and conceptualization of the region’s needs, encompassing all sectors of economic and human development, is the key to success. “By matching projects to the specific needs of the area and bringing in other parties from the government and private sector, we are giving people the tools they need to manage their futures.” And it started in part with a six-week visit to the US by someone who fell in love with English in high school.