Euro-Moroccan films have already become mainstays of the international festival circuit, notably Faouzi Bensaïdi’s family-history epic A Thousand Months, winner of the 2003 Cannes Film Festival Le Premier Regard, and Laïla Marrakchi’s Marock, about a Muslim girl and Jewish boy who fall in love, which screened at Cannes in 2005. With their stylish handling of colliding personal crises in Heaven’s Doors (2006), Spanish-Moroccan directors Swel and Imad Noury hit the festival circuit with The Man Who Sold the World, a Dostoyevsky-existentialist fable set in Casablanca.
Thanks to critical acclaim and government support, new voices and new formats are emerging in Moroccan cinema. Young directors are finding their voices through a new film school in Marrakesh and short-film showcases, including back-to-back short-film festivals in Rabat and Tangier in October. Women directors have stepped into the spotlight, from Farida Benlyazid’s 2005 hit The Dog’s Life of Juanita Narboni, a Spanish expat’s chronicle of Tangier from the 1930s to the 1960s, to star Mahassine El Hachadi, who won the short-film prize at the 2010 Marrakesh International Film Festival while still in film school.
Leila Kilani's Les Yeux Secs (2003) broke further ground by not only being filmed in Amazigh rather than Arabic, but tackling hard subjects such as female trafficking and prostitution. The use of social critique hasn't been without criticism, but filmmakers have been unafraid to push back in the name of artistic freedom. Star director Nabil Ayouch's Much, Loved (2014) was banned for discussing prostitution, but Behind Closed Doors, directed the same year by Mohammed Ahed Bensouda, focused on workplace sexual harassment of women and led to a national discussion on changing Moroccan laws.
Morocco doesn't just provide filming locations for movies. Smash-hit TV series Game of Thrones has used the ramparts of Essaouira and Aït Benhaddou as backdrops for its wandering dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen.
Arts & Crafts
The usual arts and crafts hierarchy is reversed in Morocco, where the craft tradition is ancient and revered, while visual art is a more recent development. Ornament is meant to be spiritually uplifting, while nonfunctional objects and representational images have traditionally been viewed as pointless – or worse, vanity verging on idolatry. While Morocco's contemporary visual-arts scene remains small, its many beautiful crafts – from carpets and leather to pottery and metalwork – make the quintessential souvenir of any trip.
Visual Arts
Perhaps because it has been relegated to a marginal position, Moroccan contemporary art has particular poignancy and a sense of urgency, expressing aspirations and frustrations that can be understood instinctively – while eluding media censorship.
The new artworks emerging from Morocco are not kitschy paintings of eyelash-batting veiled women and scowling turbaned warriors, though you’ll still find these in tourist showrooms. These form a 19th-century French Orientalist tradition made largely for export, and contemporary Moroccan artists such as Hassan Hajjaj are cleverly tweaking it. Hajjaj’s provocative full-colour photographs of veiled women are not what you’d expect: one tough lady flashing the peace sign wears a rapper-style Nike-logo veil, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Just Do It’ across her mouth, while his 'Kesh Angels' series showed women bikers on the streets of Marrakesh.
Morocco’s visual-art scene put down roots in the 1950s and '60s, when folk artists in Essaouira and Tangier made painting and sculpture their own by incorporating Berber symbols and locally scavenged materials. Landscape painting became a popular way to express pride of place in Essaouira and Asilah, and abstract painting became an important means of poetic expression in Rabat and Casablanca.
Marrakesh’s art scene combines elemental forms with organic, traditional materials, helping to ground abstract art in Morocco as an indigenous art form. The scene has taken off in the past decade, with the Marrakech Biennale launched in 2005 and Morocco’s first International Art Fair in 2009.
Mahi Binebine creates ethereal figures in beeswax, colliding, pulling apart, not seeing one another; Hassan Echair designs objects hanging in tenuous balance: white fence-posts, charcoal, twigs wrapped in string; Larbi Cherkaoui's work contains gestural and seemingly urgent calligraphic flourishes on goatskin.
Khadija Kabbaj makes basketry tables, mummified Barbies and other subversively applied traditions; Hicham Benohoud produces self-portraits with faces obliterated by shredded paper, sticky notes, corks; Hassan Hajjaj creates mock fashion photos of women in Louis Vuitton veils and Moroccan-flag jellabas.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy remains Morocco’s most esteemed visual art form, practised and perfected in Moroccan medersas (theological schools) over the last 1000 years. In Morocco, calligraphy isn’t just in the Quran: it’s on tiled walls, inside stucco arches, and literally coming out of the woodwork. Look carefully, and you’ll notice that the same text can have an incredibly different effect in another calligraphic style. One calligrapher might take up a whole page with a single word, while another might turn it into a flower, or fold and twist the letters origami-style into graphic patterns.
The style most commonly used for Qurans is Naskh, a slanting cursive script introduced by the Umayyads. Cursive letters ingeniously interlaced to form a shape or dense design are hallmarks of the Thuluth style, while high-impact graphic lettering is the Kufic style from Iraq. You’ll see three main kinds of Kufic calligraphy in Morocco: angular, geometric letters are square Kufic; those bursting into bloom are foliate Kufic; and letters that look like they’ve been tied by sailors are knotted Kufic.
Lately, contemporary artists have reinvented calligraphy as a purely expressive art form, combining the elegant gestures of ancient scripts with the urgency of urban graffiti. Farid Belkahia’s enigmatic symbols in henna and Larbi Cherkaoui’s high-impact graphic swoops show that even freed of literal meanings, calligraphy can retain its poetry.
To find out more about where those splendid traditional designs originated and learn to trace a few yourself, check out The Splendour of Islamic Calligraphy by Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi.
You can try your hand at traditional Arabic calligraphy, and learn some of its history, with lessons at Cafe Clock in Fez and Marrakesh.
Crafts
For instant relief from sterile modernity, head to your nearest Moroccan souq to admire the inspired handiwork of local mâalems (master artisans). Most of Morocco’s design wonders are created without computer models or even an electrical outlet, relying instead on imagination, an eye for colour and form, and steady hands you’d trust to take out a tonsil.
All this takes experience. In Fez, the minimum training for a ceramic mâalem is 10 years, and it takes a zellij mosaic-maker three to four months to master a single shape – and with 360 shapes to learn, mastery is a lifelong commitment. When you watch a mâalem at work, it’s the confidence of the hand movements, not the speed, that indicates a masterwork is in the making. Techniques and tools are handed down from one generation to the next, and friendly competition among neighbours propels innovation.
Instead of sprawling factory showrooms, mâalems work wonders in cubby holes lining souqs, each specialising in a traditional trade. But artisans in rural areas are not to be outdone: many Moroccan villages are known for a style of embroidery or a signature rug design. Most of the artisans you’ll see in the souqs are men, but you’re likely to glimpse women mâalems working behind the scenes knotting carpets in Anti Atlas and Middle Atlas villages, weaving textiles along the Southern coast and painting ceramics in Fez, Salé and Safi.
Answers to your every ‘how’d they do that?’ are on display at state-run Ensemble Artisanales, where you can watch mâalems at work and purchase their handiwork at fixed (if somewhat stiff) prices.
Carpets
If you manage to return from Morocco without a carpet, you may well congratulate yourself on being one of few travellers to have outsmarted the wiliest salespeople on the planet.
Moroccan carpets hook travellers almost every time because there’s a right
carpet for almost everyone – and if that sounds like something your mother once said to you about soul mates, it’s not entirely a coincidence. Women in rural Morocco traditionally created carpets as part of their dowries, expressing their own personalities in exuberant colours and patterns, and weaving in symbols of their hopes for health and married life. Now carpets are mostly made as a way to supplement household income, but in the hands of a true mâalem, a hand-woven carpet brings so much personality and baraka (blessings) underfoot, it could never be mistaken for a mere doormat.
Carpets you see in the souqs may already have been bought and sold three or four times, with the final price representing a hefty mark-up over what the weaver was paid for her work. Consider buying directly from a village association instead: the producer is more likely to get her fair share of the proceeds, you’ll get a better deal without extensive bargaining, and you may meet the artisan who created your new rug.
TOP CARPET-BUYING TIPS
AKnow your limits, namely how much blank wall and floor space you actually have, your airline’s luggage weight limit, the cost of shipping and duty, and purchase price.
ATread cautiously with antique rugs. Precious few genuine antique rugs are left in Morocco. New rugs are aged by being taken out back and stomped on, bleached by the sun or otherwise treated.
AInspect the knots. You’ll be asked to pay more for carpets with a higher number of knots per sq cm, which you’ll begin to discern by examining the back of carpets to look for gaps between knots. Some carpets are washed in hot water to bind the wool together more tightly, but you can often distinguish these shrunken rugs by their misshapen, irregular borders.
AGet plenty of vegetables. Prices are often higher for carpets whose wool is coloured using vegetable dyes (which tend to fade faster) instead of synthetics; you can usually tell these by their muted tones, and the carpet seller may be able to tell you what plant was used to make the dye.
AThere's no set price, so enjoy the transaction. Banter before you bargain, keep your sense of humour, come back tomorrow, and drink mint tea so sweet you’ll want to brush your teeth twice. Besides fond memories, at the end of it all you should have a carpet that suits you.
The most reliable resource in English on Moroccan carpets is the (aptly named) Moroccan Carpets, by Brooke Pickering, W Russell Pickering and Ralph S Yohe. It's packed with photos to help pinpoint the origins and style of any carpet that mysteriously followed you home.
Textiles
Anything not nailed down in Morocco is likely to be woven, sewn or embroidered – and even then, it might be upholstered. Moroccan women are the under-recognised mâalems of Moroccan textiles, and the tradition they’ve established has recently helped attract emerging fashion enterprises and global brands to Morocco. One-third of Moroccan women are employed in Morocco’s industrial garment industry, but for meticulous handiwork with individual flair, check out traditional textile handicrafts.
Top Moroccan Modern Textiles
Cooperative Tigmi, Aït Oudinar
Al Nour, Marrakesh
Cooperative Artisanale des Femmes de Marrakesh
Sidi Ghanem, Marrakesh
Embroidery
Moroccan stitchery ranges from simple Berber designs to minutely detailed terz Fezzi, the elaborate nature-inspired patterns that are stitched in blue upon white linen and that women in Fez traditionally spend years mastering for their dowries. Rabati embroidery is a riot of colour, with bold, graphic flowers in one or two colours of silk thread that almost completely obscures the plain-cotton backing. But the ladies of Salé also deserve their due for their striking embroidery in one or two bold colours along the borders of crisp white linen.
Passementerie
What’s that guy doing with a blow-dryer and silk thread down a medina side alley? That would be a passementerie (trims) mâalem at work, using a repurposed blow-dryer to spin thread from a nail stuck in the wall, until it’s the perfect width and length to make into knotted buttons, silken tassels and snappy jellaba trim. In a cupboard-sized Moroccan passementerie shop, you’ll find enough gold braid to decorate an army of generals and more tassels than a burlesque troupe could spin in a lifetime – but you’ll also find a jackpot of small, portable gifts. Moroccan mâalems have made a stand-alone art of trimming, wrapping wire and washers with silk thread to create mod statement necklaces, napkin-ring holders, knotted keychains and curtain-pulls.
Felt
Handmade felt hats, slippers, coats, pillows, bags or floor coverings really put wool through the wringer: it’s dyed, boiled and literally beaten to a pulp. Instead of being woven or sewn, felt is usually pounded with savon noir (natural palm soap), formed into the intended shape on a mould and allowed to dry gradually to hold its shape. Felt makers are usually found in the wool souq in major cities.
Weaving
Beyond the sea of imported harem pants and splashy synthetic jellabas in the souqs, hand-woven Moroccan fabrics with exceptional sheen and texture may catch your eye: nubby organic cotton from the Rif, shiny ‘cactus silk’ (soie végétale) woven with cotton and rayon from the south, sleek Marrakesh table linens and whisper-soft High Atlas woollen blankets. Some lesser-quality knock-offs are industrially produced, but connoisseurs seek out the plusher nap, tighter weave and elegant drape of hand-woven Moroccan fabrics.
In souqs, village cooperatives and Ensemble Artisanal showrooms, you might glimpse two to four women at a time on a loom, working on a single piece. Men work larger looms for jellaba fabric, pushing the shuttle with arms as they pound pedals with their feet – producing one yard of fabric this way is a workout equivalent to running several miles while dribbling a basketball. You can buy linens and clothing ready-made or get hand-woven fabric by the bolt or metre, and have Moroccan decor and couture custom-made to your specifications. Tailors can be found in every major city, but be sure to leave enough time for the initial consultation plus two fittings for clothing.
Fair-Trade Carpets
Jemaite Tifawin Carpet Cooperative, Anzal
Cooperative Feminin de Tissage Aït Bououli, Aït Bououli
Kasbah Myriem, Midelt
Coopérative de Tissage, Ouarzazate
Ensemble Artisanales in cities nationwide
CARPET CATEGORIES
Rabati carpets Plush pile carpets in deep jewel tones, featuring an ornate central motif balanced by fine detail along the borders. Many of the patterns may remind you of a formal garden, but you may see newer animal motifs and splashy modern abstract designs. Rabati carpets are highly prized, and could cost you Dh2000 per sq metre.
Chichaoua rugs Simple and striking, with spare zigzags, asterisks, and enigmatic symbols on a variegated red or purple background (about Dh700 to Dh1000 per sq metre).
Hanbels or kilims These flat-woven rugs with no pile make up for a lack of cushiness with character. Some hanbels include Berber letters and auspicious symbols such as the evil eye, Southern Cross and Berber fibule (brooch) in their weave. Ask the seller to explain them for you – whether it’s folklore or fib, the carpet-seller’s interpretation adds to the experience (from Dh400 to Dh900 per sq metre).
Zanafi or glaoua Kilims and shag carpeting, together at last. Opposites attract in these rugs, where sections of fluffy pile alternate with flat-woven stripes or borders. These are usually Dh1000 to Dh1800 per sq metre.
Shedwi Flat-woven rugs with bold patterns in black wool on off-white, so au naturel you can still feel the lanolin between your fingers when you rub it. For as little as Dh400 for a smaller rug, they’re impressive yet inexpensive gifts.
Leatherwork
Now that there’s not much call for camel saddles anymore, Moroccan leather artisans keep busy fashioning embossed leather book-covers and next season’s must-have handbags with what look like medieval dentistry tools. Down medieval derbs (alleys), you’ll discover freshly tanned and dyed lime-green leather sculpted into fashion-forward square pouffes (ottomans), yellow pompoms carefully stitched onto stylish fuchsia k
idskin gloves, or shocking silver leather stretched and sewn into flouncy bedroom slippers. Along these leather souqs, you might spot artisans dabbing henna onto stretched goatskin to make ‘tattooed’ leather candle-holders, lampshades or stand-alone artworks. If you’re in town for a couple of days, you might even commission an artisan to make you a custom-made bag, lambskin leather jacket or jodhpurs.
If it’s an authenticity trip you’re after, for men you’ll prefer the traditional yellow babouches (slippers) or ‘Berber Adidas’, slippers with soles made from recycled rubber tyres. Women’s babouches come in a broader range of colours and designs, and you may see vats of vibrant dye used for them in tanneries in Fez. But as colourful as they may look from afar, the tanneries give off a putrid stench – many medina residents would prefer to see them outside the city limits.
Never let it be said that Moroccan leatherwork can't keep up with modern trends: look out for the traditional babouche (pointed slippers) branded with English and Spanish football club logos – and Raja Casablanca and MAS Fes for the domestic tourism market.
Lonely Planet Morocco Page 88