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decade ago, Marrakech had very little world cinema culture till Morocco’s ruling royalty thought up of a movie festival. The Marrakech International Film Festival just ended its ninth edition, and the Festival has grown into a reasonably impressive affair. And despite Morocco having been a French colony, where even today most people speak that language, it is the Indian cinema that has captured the people’s imagination there. <br /><br />I still remember how delirious Moroccans were when the Festival honoured Amitabh Bachchan a few years ago. Drivers of limousines still talk about Big B and his magnetism When Vishal Bharadwaj’s “Omkara” (inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello, but set in Uttar Pradesh’s bad lands) was screened in Marrakech’s open square, Jamaa-el-Fna, the crowds could not stop cheering and clapping. Such seemed to be the mesmeric effect of Saif Ali Khan (who plays the villainous Iago) or Kareena Kapoor (Desdemona) or Ajay Devgan (Othello).<br /><br />At a reception later that evening for Bharadwaj, young Moroccan girls turned up in bright eye-catching saris -- bindis and kajal Indianising their faces -- lisping Bollywood songs! Some of them could even speak Hindi, and I found to my utter amazement that they had picked it up by watching Hindi television serials and movies. And these are available on disks by their dozens at dearth cheap prices in the souk or marketplace. <br /><br />A cursory glance at these shops was a revelation. Some of the latest blockbusters, all pirated of course, were on sale, each costing some 10 Moroccan Dirhams or Rs 60 approximately. Admittedly, they were all in Hindi, and this year, I saw DVDs of “Love Aaj Kal”, “Kal Kisne Dekha” and “New York”. Somehow, Mumbai seems to have manipulated the world into believing that Bollywood is indeed Indian cinema, and that there is nothing beyond Maya Nagari.<br /><br />So, it only seemed heartening when the Festival chose Rituparno Ghosh’s Bengali film, “Abhoman” (The Eternal), the only entry from India this year. It is a chamber piece of love, loss and betrayal, and it reminded me of Satyajit Ray’s last works when his heart condition stopped him from using ambitious outdoor locales. <br /><br />In fact, “Abhoman” is reportedly inspired by Satyajit Ray’s life, at least a chapter from it, and it recounts the story of a maverick movie director who falls in love with a beautiful young star. One of the finest helmers in Bengal, Aniket (essayed by Dipankar Dey), is a married man, whose wife, Deepti (Mamta Shankar), has also been an actress, and when a young star (Ananya Chatterjee) intrudes, there can only be ache and anguish. Although extra-marital affair in cinema is as old as cinema itself, Ghosh handles the theme with dignity and subtlety. <br /><br />Unfortunately, Ghosh declined to come to Marrakech at the last minute. The organizers were pretty cut up with this. One of them told me that “we had agreed to everything he asked for, club class ticket and the like…Now he has written to us saying he will not be coming. We are in a mess”. The Festival takes pride in introducing the director and his or her actors before every screening.<br /><br />However, the India connection remained unbroken this winter with actress-director Nandita Das on the 10-member jury, chaired by renowned Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami. And the star power was unbelievable: Emir Kusturica (from Bosnia, with classics such as “Underground”, “Black Cat, White Cat”, “Life is a Miracle” and “Promise Me This”), Jim Jarmusch ( America -“Broken Flowers” and “The Limits of Control”), Alfanso Cuaron ( Mexico -“Great Expectations”, “Yu Tu Mama Tambien” and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”), “Ben Kingsley (British -“Gandhi”, “Death and the Maiden” “Schindler’s List” and “Oliver Twist”), Mike Figgis ( British -“Leaving Las Vegas”) and Christopher Walken ( America -“Pulp Fiction” and “Catch Me If You Can”) and Elia Suleiman ( Palestine -“Divine Intervention” and “The Time That Remains”). <br /><br />The master classes that some of these men held were masterly. Jarmusch began with a philosophic comment, “life is a series of moments that never come back”, while Suleiman told me during an interview that he had a tiny bit of hope that Barak Obama would sort out the Palestinian question. Kinglsey, who is now all set to play Shah Jahan in “Taj Mahal” that he plans to produce, with Aishwarya Rai as Mumtaz, dreamt of being “the envoy for cinema”, and Kusturica was happy that he turned out to be a film-maker rather than the gangster his parents feared he would be. <br /><br />This heady cocktail of celebrities was embellished with a magical mix of movies, most of them first or second attempts. The fresh helmers may not have mastered the grammar of cinema, and their lack of finesse was discernable. But their individuality was radical, their plots surprisingly convincing and their approach shorn of pretension.<br /><br />Egypt’s Ahmad Abdalla tells us in his “Heliopolis” how six men and women in a Cairo suburb have a bad day when just about everything goes wrong for them. A couple planning to buy a house and live together fail to get a refrigerator. A man cannot get his visa, and they all know by sunset that they have to begin their efforts all over again the following morning. Maybe mundane at one level, but Aballa’s treatment is engagingly stylish.<br /><br />Nosir Saidov portrays a different kind of struggle in his “True Noon”. The historical tension between Tajikstan and Uzbekistan is the starting point of his script that he uses stunningly to weave the story of a young woman all set to marry the man she loves. But when her mountain village of Safedobi is partioned and fenced by soldiers one fine morning, there is disarray and dismay as the lovers are separated. Saidov takes his film to a dramatic end, but punctuates the narrative with a touch of comic. <br /><br />Rigorberto Perezcano’s “Northless” is another movie that depicts the anguish political borders can cause to men and women. Set in a small Mexican town where Andres is biding time to get across to the American new world, the picture explores the emotional conflict that can arise out of such situations. Two women try and stop Andreas from making his enth try to illegally cross over. But he remains undaunted, sure that his destiny lay on the other side of the barbed wires. Modest production values with an incredible end must have been some of the high points for the jury giving it the Festival’s top Golden Star Prize.<br /><br />Sparse frames and few dialogues mark the Polish work by Urszula Antoniak, “Nothing Personal”. The auteur says in her statement, “When our contemporary world is busy with issues of unification and integration, the two characters of my film choose a solitude they see as personal freedom and comfort. But is not the longing for contact human”. This is precisely what the movie sets out to discover. A mysterious young woman and a lonely widower play out their parts in a deserted landscape. When he finds her at his home one day, he offers her food for work. She accepts the deal, but will not answer any questions or divulge her name. However, the picture settles into an easy pace with the woman mellowing down. Though, he craves for company, and she loves to be alone, they reach a meeting point and a beautiful trust between them emerges. Understandably some may find the film perplexing, and that is because we hardly know anything about the woman or why she shuns human contact.<br /><br />Morton Giese’s “Love and Rage” also tackles man-woman relationship, but in an explosive manner. It tracks a young, talented pianist’s descent into insanity, traits he inherits from his father. At many levels it is an intense psychological drama. When Daniel wins a scholarship from a coveted New York school, he knows that it is dream come true. However, his attraction for his classmate, Sofie, turns into jealousy and rage that can only destroy him, his relationship and a great future. Giese handles this dilemmatic episode with understated nuances and fine music in a work that merely underlines how wonderfully different cinema can be. And yet be so compelling.<br /><br />(Published December 27 2009 in The Week)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p><br /><div align="center"><script src="http://www.gautamanbhaskaran.com/gb/adsense2.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><table cellspacing="0" bordercolordark="#ff9999" cellpadding="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#e10000" bordercolorlight="#660000" border="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center" height="5"><font color="#ffffff"><b><img height="1" src="http://gautamanbhaskaran.com/gb/images/spacer.gif" width="1" /></b></font></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><script src="http://www.gautamanbhaskaran.com/gb/stat.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter.js" type="text/javascript"></script></td></tr></tbody></table></html>