Research snapshots

Yassine El Idrissi (Morocco 1983) has a background in ICT and photo journalism. An interview about choosing the right form for a given subject.

“I have a background as a photo journalist. Because I wanted more time to investigate my subject matters, I decided to leave journalism and become a filmmaker. In my first documentaries, I presented facts by showing everything I considered relevant. I found out that showing everything comes down to showing nothing. That’s why I decided to investigate the effects of form or style on the perception of the subject and on the relations between the subject and me and between the subject and the spectator.

My subject is the cultural and intellectual crisis in Morocco. For me as a Moroccan film enthusiast, the absence of a vivid film culture in Morocco has been an increasingly disappointing experience over the last ten years. In our capital Rabat, there are only four or five cinemas. Every year, only some 15 highly predictable feature films are released domestically. They are hardly shown abroad, let alone awarded. This is not directly a matter of politics or finance. Look at a country like Iran: the regime is harsh and repressive, yet the film industry is extremely productive and critically and commercially successful. Morocco isn’t exactly a modern democracy, but we have more liberties than people in Iran. So what’s the matter in Morocco? Why don’t people think? What’s the background of our massive cultural inertia and hypocrisy?

Combining this subject with my investigation into the effects of form and style on perception of the subject by myself and the spectator, I decided to make a documentary film, portraying myself in my actual efforts to develop a short fiction film in Morocco. This fiction film will be an ‘Iranian’ film, made according to the ‘rules’ of the successful Iranian cinema. The title of the documentary film will be ‘The Iranian Film’. The fiction project will be developed in the context of my research project. Our efforts might well result in a developed, funded fiction project to be shot in 2013. However, this fiction project, without being a pretext, is initiated in order to make a documentary in which we investigate my actual subject: the cultural crisis in Morocco. We are planning to shoot this documentary later this year. It will be a comic documentary with a lot of everyday-life scenes in which I am working on the preparation of the project: funding, script editing, casting, location scouting, negotiating, et cetera.

I am not intending to make any intellectual statements or moral accusations. On the contrary: I’ll take it easy. The film will look and feel like a spontaneous home movie with a light tone. I hope this specific, light form will produce and maybe amplify the effect that the audience will start asking itself questions about the relations between media, politics and the current state of Moroccan film culture. About the effects of hypocrisy, artistic corruption and self-censorship.  

I have just started to discover how many films I can make about one single subject. It‘s great to have the opportunity to find out how to make choices.”

February 2012