Change Your Image
cinomar-chraibi
Or
The sweet secrets of Omar Chra�bi�s cinema
By Mohamed Soukri: critic and academic
Omar Chra�bi is a movie embroiderer. The matter of his cinema, his raw material is a fabric he works on with his own hands. I will come back later on to this metaphor.
With his hand, Chra�bi must have touched everything, that is to say all that is related to the professions of cinema which have not been fully tested in Morocco � far from it- but that a young initiated like Omar Chra�bi had to practice in turn as he was building his career.
Prerequisites
First of all, he had to prepare himself by going through photography, in Belgium, communication at Stendhal university in France, arts studies at Casablanca university in Morocco, movie industry and finally production at Paris-Sorbonne in France.
He first begins as assistant and first assistant director of fiction full-length films. He assisted one of the greatest Moroccan directors of � Deconstruction � Mustafa Derkaoui in � Titre provisoire � � Fiction premi�re � and � Les beaux jours de Shahrazade �. He also assisted other directors that are no less famous: Abdelkader Lagta� in � Un amour � Casablanca �, his brother Saad Chra�bi in � Chroniques d�une vie normale �, Abderrahmane Tazi in � A la recherche du mari de ma femme � etc.
He is the production manager, producer and associate producer of several movies and in television as well. He was the production manager of � Je (u) au pass� � and � Les sept portes de la nuit � by M. Derkaoui, � Chevaux de fortune � by J. Ferhati, � Un simple fait divers � by H. Noury, � Femmes et femmes � by Saad Chra�bi, etc.
He is co-scriptwriter of his own films � L�homme qui brodait des secrets �, � Rahma � but also of films by other filmmakers such as � Chevaux de fortune � by Jilali Ferhati, � L�histoire d�une rose � by Abdelmadjid Rechiche�
Very often in Morocco, a filmmaker first begins with short films before getting to full-length films.
This is why Omar Chra�bi first made three short films: � Jeu fatal � a 13 minute-short film where he plays the leading role, � Lumi�re � 17 minutes, which is one of the five films that celebrated the centenary of cinema and finally � Fabula �, 13 minutes. These films have been produced between 1993 and 1996.
This is a fact, short films, even if they are not so common in the market and also probably because of that, have become a type of cinema in its own right. It is not the appendix anymore of the full-length film, nor an eternal school and learning lesson. It has its own thinking and its own codes. This is why short films produced by Omar Chra�bi represented for him cinema essays or tests above all. Not only he had to use short films to demonstrate his technical skills but also and mainly to gradually implement a cinematographic approach that he was to develop afterwards in his full-length movies.
In this short film exercise, the concern dedicated to the tale � in the sense of imaginary confabulation- but also to the narrative and cinematographic form was such that the way the audience welcomed his full-length films was probable and foreseeable.
A long alchemy
In addition, Omar Chra�bi produced three full-length movies between 2000 and 2009, in an emblematic context of the evolution of the Moroccan cinema. Subsidized cinema, for lack of private initiative and market scantiness, the Moroccan cinema is evolving surely but slowly in the heavy mazes of production. However, the rhythm of this production is continuously increasing to reach approximately 10 to 15 full-length films per year.
� L�homme qui brodait des secrets � (The man who embroidered secrets) had already revealed in 2000 a significant token appearance of the director Omar Chra�bi. I had personally presented this film at the National Film Festival of Marrakech, inviting on stage the renowned actors who played in the film, even before it was projected: Mohamed Zouhair, actor renowned in cinema and theatre, a young actress from theatre and cinema, Samiaa Akariou and mainly the powerful character of the Moroccan theatre, Tayab Saddiki.
The scenario of this film has been jointly written by the director himself and Mourad Khayerdinne. In its texture and form, this film served as a metaphor to qualify the whole work and filmography of Omar Chra�bi. In this metaphor, the act of embroidering becomes as interesting or even more than the embroidered matter. By its form, this film gives thus more information on the way of telling than on the told story. In this story, Naji a young academic, fond of poetry, one day finds a manuscript by a poet deceased without leaving a trace. When discovering the house of the poet, Naji decides to do him justice by restoring it and turning it into a museum. But this dream is taken out of him by the town council that turns it into a restaurant for tourists. This attempt of re-appropriation of a memory is doomed to failure. What is left from all this apart from this initiation, this learning, this silent investigation in the secrets of a poet and his poetry? This is mainly a question of learning, beyond the sense of secret, of the sense of friendship. The poetry work does not concern the content only but also the form of the film, in the way that the positions of the camera, its visual angles represent his � lines �.
In 2003, Chra�bi produces his second full-length movie � Rahma �. Here again, I come across the filmmaker through the project he has presented to the support fund which I was a member of. This fund, as everybody knows, chooses and subsidizes some film projects presented to it. With � Rahma �, Chra�bi changes style. His film comes within comedy, quite uncommon in Morocco. But which type of comedy? The one that matches the character and the style of the leading actor, Hassan Al Fad known for his ability to be ironic with restraint and to stylise funniness and humour. In this film, he plays the role of Chaoui, prototype of the man we usually meet without necessarily paying attention to him, a self-effacing man, in the image of these painstaking ants of a thankless society. The exaggeration of real life prompts us to laugh.
In 2009, � Hands and cloth� is his third full-length film where our metaphor on the aesthetics of embroidery and fabric is used again.
This film is nearly a tale. The principle of this film lies on the choice of a type of story that throws the audience in a disconnected universe somehow disconcerting. To and from the native village of a young entrant to the theatre and Rabat, the administrative capital of Morocco where there is the only existing Higher Institute of Drama, the film re-builds a production made of a world of dreams, puppets, illusions and crisis of a disconnected and contradictory society.
This is the perspective in which lies cinema by Omar Chra�bi, a cinema resolutely disconnected as well, because this aesthetic position protects its author from any conformism or easy labelling.
Finally, the films by Omar Chra�bi differentiate themselves by the way they play with various materials such as poetry, humour and the strangeness of narration. When they are viewed, these films seem indeed well embroidered in this alchemy.
Reviews
Tissée de mains et d'étoffe (2007)
Movie Review: Hands and Cloth
Movie Review: Hands and Cloth by Roger Moore
There was something profound in Albert Brooks' failed odyssey Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, a film that searched for humor within a religious culture that, to most Westerners, seems utterly humorless.
So any attempt at lightness coming out of the Islamic world can be celebrated, even if the laughs aren't as frequent or as big as you'd like.
Omar Chraibi's film, Hands and Cloth is a comedy about a rural Moroccan puppeteer going to arts school in the big city. The chief virtue of this slight and gentle-hearted, fish-out-of-water comedy is its novel setting and the world the film takes us into.
ÖMnaouer (Tarek Bakhari) is a 20something puppeteer whose elaborate shows, which he builds sets for and molds puppets out of clay and cloth to perform in, depict a fantasy version of the life he leads in his tiny village. Almost everybody in town curls up in front of the stage when he sets to work. He'd love to get better at this, maybe good enough to earn a laugh or two from his schizophrenic mother.
But the local sheik has other designs. Mnaouer has talent, ambition and a vivid imagination. He should go to the capital city, get into arts school.
"You are our ambassador," the sheik lectures. Go, do well, because "we want to value what we are."
So the young man with a big imagination auditions to get into arts school and, shades of Fame, discovers that a wacky cross-section of Moroccan youth is trying to get in, too. He befriends the fast-talking Maati (Abdellah ÖDidane, hilarious), who goes by the nickname "Nmoutana" and figures he can get in by dressing like and impersonating Al Pacino's Tony Montana from Scarface.
"Say 'Alllooo to my leetle friends!' "
And Mnaouer also meets the woman of his fantasies (Rim Chemaou), an actress/dancer he envisions as his Tinkerbelle.
Director Chraibi serves up bizarre on a budget when he sends Mnaouer into magical realism idylls, envisioning classmates as live-action puppets and seeking an old hermit, the only other villager to get out of his Neverland.
Hands and Cloth, in Arabic and French with English subtitles, has a few winning sight gags, some funny characters and touches of wordplay aimed more at native Moroccans. But the film, opening this weekend at the Plaza Cinema Café, is just funny enough that you kind of wish Albert Brooks had gone to Morocco instead of Pakistan and India in his fruitless search for laughs.
Hands and Cloth Cast: Tarek Bakhari, Rim Chemaou, Abdellah Didane Director: Omar Chraibi Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes Industry rating: Unrated, some subtitled profanity