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Chapter One: The Most Successful Moroccan Film Ever
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Chapter One The Most Successful Moroccan Film Ever Introduction: “A Societal Phenomenon” Unprecedented acclaim greeted the release of Looking for My Wife’s Husband in 1993: “The first entirely Moroccan film that makes us laugh . . . [with] much talent and subtlety,” “without doubt the best Moroccan film I’ve ever seen . . . the public, more than a thousand people . . . were all bursting with laughter,” “we rediscovered the pleasures of a fertile and supple narration of the kind that constituted the millennial charm of Arab stories,” “this new film of M. A. Tazi keeps the director among the best, and perhaps even the best, of Moroccan filmmakers,” “M. A. Tazi shows . . . that the Moroccan cinema can give pleasure to a broad public without making thematic, artistic, or technical compromises with regard to the essentials of our own experience, or falling into the sarcasm of light melodramas of the Egyptian sort.” This critical praise, voiced both at home and abroad, was echoed by the Moroccan public, which came out to see the film in record numbers, turning it into what was often called “a societal phenomenon.”1 What made this success even more surprising was that it emerged against a historical background in which, for decades prior to the early 1990s, the distribution circuit was dominated by films from abroad and Moroccan films had great difficulty finding theaters for screening. In the early 1990s one Moroccan distributor decided to begin dealing The poster for Looking for My Wife’s Husband [3.238.107.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:52 GMT) 22 Beyond Casablanca in Moroccan films and Looking was his second success in a row.2 Today, with this distributor frequently handling Moroccan films and other distributors doing so occasionally, and with the public often responding positively, a new Moroccan film’s prospects, while not rosy, are certainly more promising than they were a mere decade earlier. Why were distributors and theater owners refusing Moroccan films into the early 1990s and what led this one Moroccan distributor to break the pattern?3 Distributing and Screening Films in Morocco Patterns of film distribution and exhibition have their roots in the colonial period, when foreign-owned, vertically integrated companies were established in Morocco to perform these activities. These companies distributed imported films and owned theater networks but, operating as subsidiaries of the major, Westernbased distribution companies, they had little choice in the films they were offered—these were determined overseas by the major foreign distributors and offered in the form of “block booking.” Even with independence in 1956 and the later “Moroccanization” of such enterprises in the early 1970s, this basic structure continued to dominate the sector.4 The state never showed much interest in influencing the economics of distribution and exhibition, and these have remained fully privatized throughout Moroccan history. Both distributors and exhibitors seek to generate profit by keeping the amounts they pay for films as low as possible. Imported films are systematically available more cheaply than Moroccan films, since the latter need to recoup their costs in the small national market, whereas imported films have already paid off their investment in their runs abroad and can be priced as low as is necessary to ensure market share. Consequently, from the distributor-exhibitor perspective, renting the national film constitutes an unwarranted financial risk. Nor has the state sought to weaken the preponderant influence of foreign interests by introducing measures such as quotas on imports or by imposing quotas on exhibitors.5 Nor is any special benefit provided to either distributor or exhibitor that might encourage them to take on a Moroccan film. As a result, the local distribution and exhibition firms “play an important role in the integration of the local market into the global market, answering to the needs of the latter,” The Most Successful Moroccan Film Ever 23 leading to a distribution-exhibition sector that is highly concentrated in nature and dependent on the supply of films from abroad.6 A further consequence is that, in these circumstances, there was no room for the spectators themselves to express whatever preferences they might have had for Moroccan films, because these films had practically no chance of being seen on the screens.7 However, in the early 1990s, although the sector’s basic economic structure remained the same, the availability of Moroccan films for the public was about to increase. This resulted from the happy coincidence of a Moroccan distributor viewing a number of recently made Moroccan...