Plus Polish director Damian Kocur won the Best Directing Prize for his Ukrainian story ‘Under the Volcano’.

The 21st edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM) came to a close on Saturday night, after a successful run. Nine days of great cinema, wondrous public conversations, cool encounters and dreamy interviews tied the golden ribbon for me, on a year that has been filled with cinema magic. That this edition of Marrakech also proved a record one for them, with 40,000 spectators coming to the cinemas, and among them 7,500 children and teenagers as part of the Young Audiences and Families program, reinforced the result of a long legacy of encouraging cinema in the Region for FIFM. Along with its concurrent industry program the Atlas Workshops. There were in total 71 films shown from 32 countries, and in the Competition, out of 14 films shown, 8 films were by first time filmmakers and 6 were directed by women.

After all was said and done, the jury headed by Luca Guadagnino, and featuring US actor Patricia Arquette, Belgian actor Virginie Efira, Australian actor Jacob Elordi, British-US actor Andrew Garfield, and Moroccan actor Nadia Kounda among others, rewarded films included in the Marrakech Competition section — a program of fourteen first and second features presented as world or MENA premieres. Other titles included Saïd Hamich Benlarbi’s Across the Sea (France/Morocco) and Sudan, Remember Us (France/Tunisia) by Hind Medded.

The winner of the 21st Étoile d’Or, director Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays, is a contemporary Haifa-set drama in which a minor car accident sets off a chain of events, unraveling lies and unspoken truths that sow division within a multifaceted patriarchal society. 

The Jury Prize was awarded ex aequo to Silvina Schnicer’s The Cottage (Argentina) and Mo Harawe’s The Village Next to Paradise (Somalia). Damian Kocur won the Best Directing Prize for his second feature Under the Volcano (Poland).

The prize for Best Performance by an Actress was shared this year by Wafaa Aoun and Manar Shehab for their appearances in Copti’s Happy Holidays, while the award for Best Performance by an Actor went to Roman Lutskyi for his work in Kocur’s Under the Volcano.

This year, actor and filmmaker Sean Penn, director and writer David Cronenberg and legendary Moroccan actress Naïma Elmcherqui, who passed away earlier this year, were each honored with a special tribute.

Beyond the awards and honorees though, I have to talk about this edition of the festival for me, my second time in Marrakech for the event. After years of visiting the stunning city as a tourist, being there for FIFM has been wonderful. Both times.

While big lavish parties — something of a legend in Marrakech I hear from past attendees — have been done away with, what remains is a true sense of respect for the audience. Events and screenings always started on time and for the most part, presenting one’s badge as a journalist worked its magic in getting into venues and press conferences. La Mamounia, where most junkets take place while at the festival, is an example of what great, luxury hospitality should be — with staff paying the same kind attention to both journalists and talent. In other words, Sean Penn and I, we were both treated sublimely, I assure you.

The only exception to the otherwise magnificent experience proved a failed visit to the Musée YSL, for a screening of Maria Callas Monica Bellucci: an Encounter. Over 400 film and fashion enthusiasts queued up around the building with hardly 150 places in the auditorium, causing mayhem, shouting and a shoving match between those on the frontlines. Who got it and who didn’t make it to the screening remains a mystery, with the film shown without English subtitles and a Q&A featuring Bellucci also conducted in French, missing a translator. The guards, dressed in tight jackets in YSL’s iconic Majorelle Blue were nasty, self righteous and downright incomprehensible in their lack of management, proving that even in heaven someone will spoil the experience — only because they don’t really belong there. As a friend, who managed to get in miraculously said “they all think they are Yves Saint Laurent in there, but they’re not.”

Yet the highlights were so plentiful, that affair was soon forgotten.

My thoughts on opening night were featured in Screen, as was an interview with the great man heading the Atlas Workshops, Hédi Zardi. He’s both a fashionista and a great cinema lover, qualities I admire in a person! Carrying a set of golden bells, he announces each session of the Workshops as well as lunch breaks and the end of the day.

This year’s Patron of the Workshops is also one of my personal favorite filmmakers, Jeff Nichols. From Mud, to Loving, through to his latest film The Bikeriders, Nichols has always told a story all my senses connect with. “I have to admit I’m not a student of world cinema as much as I should be and so a lot of this is opening a bunch of new doors for me,” Nichols said, during a quick roundtable on the eve of his official Atlas Workshops duties commencing. He also disclosed that he was “watching a short film from Dakar by Moly Kane and these are films I wouldn’t encounter on my own and that is the truth — for better or for worse,” adding, humbly, “I hope to leave here with a lot more knowledge.”

Other highlights included Sean Penn calling himself a “patriot in crisis” when I asked him how he feels representing a kind of diplomacy as an American in Morocco. He reminded me of why I’ve left NYC, the city I loved and grew up in. Anyone who is an American abroad, anywhere in the world. feels that way but Penn managed to give us an anthem, a mantra almost to explain the feelings of dismay, discouragement and disillusion.

During the acceptance speech for his Marrakech tribute, Penn also said, “around the world [there is] this demand for diversity — but not diversity of behavior and not diversity of opinion or language. I would just encourage everybody to be as politically incorrect as their heart desires and to engage diversity and to keep telling those stories.”

He also praised Ali Abbasi’s film The Apprentice. Abbasi, who sat on this year’s jury in Marrakech made a film about the younger days of Donald Trump in NYC, and while I agree with Penn that the Academy should not bend to political demands (couldn’t find a confirmation it had) which is unacceptable, I have to disagree with him about the complete value of the film. There are things which don’t add up in this cinematic portrayal and the main one for me is Abbasi’s understanding, or lack thereof of the city of New York, during the time Trump would have been forming his political teeth.

Another highlight proved listening to Ava DuVernay during a wonderful public Conversation moderated by film royalty Rosalie Varda (yes, Agnès’ daughter!) but also a special roundtable interview where DuVernay was all kinds of cool, talking about the importance of streaming services in places where access to cinemas is limited. “I grew up in a neighborhood where there are no movie theaters,” she said, “a Black neighborhood, cinema segregation, there is no movie theater. To go to the movie theater I had to take the bus for an hour. So do I just not see movies? What if when I was growing up there was a Netflix and I could see films from around the world…”

Something which strikes anyone who meets cinema goddess DuVernay, immediately, is her realness. I mean, I met her at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2013. Once in my life, we then followed each other on Twitter, and when her wondrous program ARRAY came on my radar, we started following each other that way. But DuVernay shook my hand at the press junket and said “I know you, you look familiar!” And that ladies and gentlemen is one of those moments, like Maya Angelou famously wrote, which you remember, for the special way a person made you feel. Later on, she came over outside La Mamounia while we were waiting for a car, and said “hope it’s not another ten years until we meet again!” More warm feelings there, and from my part, a fan for life. I was already, this just reinforced it for the woman who created ARRAY as a “multi-platform arts and social impact collective dedicated to narrative change.” With its own distribution body, plus a content aspect and ARRAY Creative Campus, which includes their signature 50-seat, state-of-the-art Amanda Cinema, named for DuVernay’s late aunt who helped foster her love of cinema. And, if that wasn’t enough, there is even a non-profit group called ARRAY Alliance.

See, I told you she’s a Goddess.

The Conversation with David Cronenberg also proved insightful. Moderated by TIFF programmer Andréa Picard, a fellow Canadian, the two seemed to have a shortcut to thoughts and ideas. “I felt I was an artist who made art, even when I made a horror film,” Cronenberg admitted, pointing out “I was pretentious.” Yet one has to wonder if a bit of that quality isn’t a necessary evil for anyone who is in the 7th art.

The Canadian helmer also talked about his 1983 film Videodrome, starring James Woods and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. “I don’t think of this film as prophetic but I could sense something,” he said, about our upcoming obsessions with devices. In the film the CEO of a small television station stumbles upon a broadcast signal of snuff movies. Layers of deception and mind control unfold as he attempts to uncover the signal's source, complicated by the increasingly intense hallucinations that cause him to lose his grasp on reality. Sound familiar?

Cronenberg’s latest The Shrouds was also screened at the festival. “You shouldn’t need to know the biography of the director for the movie to be good,” he said, pointing to the autobiographical aspect of the film, which shows a man dealing with the grief of losing his wife, in his own way. Cronenberg’s spouse of nearly 40 years Carolyn Zeifman passed away in 2017.

Finally, last words belong to Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who was kind and thoughtful during his interviews with the press, on a darkened afternoon, turning quickly into evening in the back grounds of la Mamounia. During his Conversation, held earlier in the day, the Golden Globes, Oscars and BAFTA contender, with his latest masterpiece I’m Still Here, said “it’s very easy to deconstruct things and much more difficult to build them,” pointing to the fact that COVID had destroyed the Brazilian film industry.

I’d add that credo would apply to almost anything in life. Let’s remember to build up — films, art, personalities and each other — while trying to avoid tearing down things, people and groundbreaking thoughts. We live in a challenging world with no place for bad behavior. At least not from our friends and colleagues.

Till next year, Marrakech. Inshallah.

Images courtesy of FIFM, used with permission.