The filmmaker and producer will present in nine cities her intimate and new documentary Mon Souk el Khmis, followed by Transes by Ahmed El Maânouni, a film that has become cult – which she produced in the early 80s, and which marked her career.
Born in Casablanca in 1942, Izza Genini was first a film producer and distributor before moving behind the camera and becoming a director. Her outlook is that of a Moroccan who left to live in Paris with her family at the age of 18. Thanks to a leisure trip 14 years later, she passionately rediscovered her country of origin. She then began working as a documentary filmmaker on Berber, Jewish, Arab musical expressions and more broadly on Moroccan intangible heritage.
With Mon Souk El Khmiss, the filmmaker takes us to the Morocco of her childhood. It’s about a place visited, an atmosphere and the people met. Meeting with the ambassador of the Moroccan seventh art.
By prioritizing the pleasure of music, the concern for traditions and her personal experience Izza Génini invites us on a sensitive journey, to meet artists and people visibly happy to share their talents and knowledge with us. Through her work as a producer and especially as a director, Izza Génini has worked to raise awareness of the musical heritage and popular cultures of Morocco.
At around 660m above sea level and with very little car traffic, you can breathe clear and fresh air which invites you to spend a few days there to discover the beauty of this place and its environment.
It is also at the heart of a region which is full of natural assets capable of propelling it to the forefront of tourist destinations. Fans of mountaineering, tree climbing, trekking, paragliding and water surfing will find what they are looking for there, as will fans of craft products, particularly tapestry and jewelry and folklore.
Synopsis My Souk el Khmis
The film My Thursday Souk from El Gara explores, through previously unpublished footage, Izza Génini’s intimate relationship with places, people and events in a mutual recognition.
Synopsis Trances
Nass El Ghiwane is a group of Moroccan musicians formed in the 70s in the heart of one of the poor neighborhoods of Casablanca. Mixing great traditional themes and secular incantations, their music draws from the melting pot of popular culture. The songs tell the joys of the world as well as they mourn deceased poets, proclaimed to the sound of frenetic rhythms. Along the streets and in crowded concert halls, the musical explosion unleashed by Nass El Ghiwane puts the crowds in a trance…
Providential meeting
This film retraces part of the journey of Nass El GhiWan, the standard bearers of an entire generation and of the “El GhiWan” movement. Izza entrusted the production to Ahmed El Maanouni, who filmed the concerts and followed the everyday lives of the musicians. What follows is a rich participation in production, including Zeft ce Tayeb Seddiki, Hadda by Mohamed Abouelouakar, as well as in distribution such as Il Bacio di Tosca by Daniel Shcimid or Ablakon by Roger Gnoan M’Bala in the 80s My Souk El Khmiss can be part of the same line of films made by Izza Génini which draw on Moroccan cultural, traditional and artistic heritage: Aïta, Malhoun, Moussem, Gnaouas, Retrouver Oulad Moumen, Voix du Maroc and the list is still long. And which came out in the 90s and 2000s. It was following a tour with the French Institute that we were able to discover Mon Souk El Khmiss in El Gara. “This film has a slightly different place in my filmography. Almost all the films that I have produced and directed until then were made in a very professional framework of creative documentary, as it is called in France, that is to say the development of files, the waiting and the implementation of the financing plan… etc. But as My Souk El Khmiss is essentially composed of the rushes that I rediscovered in 2021, filmed in 1994 for the film “Retrouver Oulad Moumen”, I preferred to produce it more modestly.
These rushes held a treasure! The providential meeting with Hajja El Hamdaouia and the Oulad Bouâazaoui at the Souk of El Gara which in my childhood was called Boucheron” Izza Genini says that the musicians suggested that she come and drink tea. And she adds that: “we had wonderful and exceptional times together. So, I had to do something with this material. There are several gifts on this day. “First, the meeting with Hajja El Hamdaoui, Peace to his soul, and the musicians, then their music and their songs during this meeting and finally the gift from our cameraman Jean Claude Lubtchansky who was filming without our knowledge, for pleasure personal surely, without knowing that these images would find their place in this film! This is how things happened. I had completely forgotten everything that was in this shoot until 2021. Just after covid, I discovered all of this. I decided to make a film about it.”
She adds that she did not know what she was going to do with this material. “Would it be a film about Hajja El Hamdaouia? A film about the Souk? Finally, as we worked on the images, I understood in fact that this place, El Gara, where my father took me as a child, forged the very Moroccan Izza, which, during his life, produced a number of films about Morocco. In any case, it’s this relationship to place that I tried to convey in this film.” So by exploring unpublished rushes, Izza offers us a summary of her childhood memories. My Souk EL Khmiss is perhaps the most personal work of his career.
