Written By
Allal El Alaoui.
Salé, my sweet home town, a millinium city known fot its citadels , Mansouric walls ,pirates blue boats floating on Bou Regreg river and now the marvellous presence of International Film Festival for women .i am very proud of my beloved city ,although it has lost one of the major cinema theatre called L' Opera, already founded by Charkawi Family and one of its member named Mekki was the manager and at the same time projection supervisor . The Slawis (1) have a saying that states that
Salé gives grace to foreigners but not to its natives.Indeed,
Salé has given grace to a new comer, a Tangiers man called
Noureddine Sail who comes to the city to teach intelligent cinema by founding a cineclub in the 70s.
The story how i love cinema has to do with the friendship of my father,and Mekki Cherkawi ,the manager of L' Opera. Surely,i love cinema,but does cinema love me ? it is a question which i can not answer and yet sometimes i feel that cinema does not want me anymore.Now, i am in advance of age , but happily i have realized some documentaries and written and directed 6 short films and still keep on writing especialy scripts. My father was a clerk at the council of
Salé where he met up with Mekki Cherkawi and helped him out to fix some administratif papers .Mekki was happy about the deed that my father did to him .He opened his heart to my father and from that day on , i knew that L' Opera doors would always be opened for me .It was a grace for me because i was entertained by international cinema either Egyptian one,Asiatic,Hindu and American one .How happy i was when i went to L' Opera at 15.00 each afternoon foot about 1 mile from home .at the hall of L' Opera ,the doorman smiled at me and sometimes whispered in my ear that i ,one day, would become somebody very important ,maybe a filmmaker.
I really enjoyed watching movies like One Flew Iver The Cuckoo s Nest played by Jack Nicklson ,directed by Milos Forman ,Mangala Al Badawiya directed by Mahboob Khan and
translated into Moroccan dialect by Ibrahim Sayah whose dubbing actors were like Hamidou, Taib Essadiki , Mohammed Afifi,Larbi Doghmi ,Khadija Jamal and more .Many Moroccan filmmakers were inspired by this wonderful epic movie namely Mohammed Osfour, and Ibrahim Sayah .Later on ,i had heard of Moroccan cinema presenting itself in local cinema halls with of course Souhail Ben barka, Mustapha Derkawi, Moumen Shimi,Tazi ,Lagtaa and others.I still stick myself to watching international cinema,although i have a great esteem of those filmmakers that i have just mentioned now.
Yes, in L' Opera , i saw all genres of movies, the bad and good ones .Had i become a cinephile ? Maybe, but i am sure that i had become one when i was young 12 years of age .I frequented every sunday the cineclub that was spearheaded by that cool intellectual Tangawi (2)
who taught philosophy at Moulay Youssel school in Rabat . Noureddine Sail's way to present films was so simple and yet very methodic .While he explained the theme of any films ,he presented اhis characters with wit and joy,blinked his eyes so often and stressed on verbs so that the meaning came out smoothly. The decoupage Technique of some scenes in Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein were marveoulsly revealed by his marxist laguage that we were not able to understand that time.In this movie, we saw officers , the images of lions ,very close-up of tragic Soviet faces .We would never know metaphor nor parallel editing had we not met Noureddine Sail .we were ,somewhat like the Japense cinema Master, Akira Kuruzawa who states that he had been working over more that 50 years in cinema and his he had left to the world great artistic works ,but he would never know what cinema really means .
Noureddine Sail leads CCM for a couple of years .I think It is up to the public ,journalists and critics to judge his work while he was leading Moroccan cinema .what intersets me to mention in this article is that he was the only one who signed me two cinematic cards, one is the cinephile one of L' Opera in 1970 and the other one is the filmmaker card in 2012 .
The Slawis (1) people who live in Salé .
Tangawi (2) people from Tangiers
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