About Some Meaningless Events
The high point and termination of 1970s activist cinema: poetic art and a theoretical manifesto for new Moroccan filmmaking, but also the bitter observation that it’s impossible in a society that doesn’t change. Derkaoui heads a collective of artist friends and militant Marxists, organising a meta film that blurs any distinction between documentary and fiction and swerves off towards the aesthetics of a happening. In this maze of words and mirrors, the director uses reflexivity not as an umpteenth modernist device but as an implacable self-criticism of an intellectual class suffocated by its political contradictions. Censored and banned from release and export, for a long time it was an underground cult film, including for its radical and unbridled free jazz soundtrack. A treasure rediscovered at long last!
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
The high point and termination of 1970s activist cinema: poetic art and a theoretical manifesto for new Moroccan filmmaking, but also the bitter observation that it’s impossible in a society that doesn’t change. Derkaoui heads a collective of artist friends and militant Marxists, organising a meta film that blurs any distinction between documentary and fiction and swerves off towards the aesthetics of a happening. In this maze of words and mirrors, the director uses reflexivity not as an umpteenth modernist device but as an implacable self-criticism of an intellectual class suffocated by its political contradictions. Censored and banned from release and export, for a long time it was an underground cult film, including for its radical and unbridled free jazz soundtrack. A treasure rediscovered at long last!
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
