Morocco: Marrakech International Film Festival 2017 Cancelled

The Marrakech International Film Festival announced in July 2017 that its 2017 session would be cancelled. The festival had originally been scheduled for December.

The festival, founded in 2001, posted the news of the cancellation in a Facebook post, stating that the it would not affect the 2018 session, which was still on the cards.

The statement added, “We took this decision to enable the Festival to continue its mission to both promote the Moroccan film industry and open the door to other cultures and the inevitable reality of the universality of ‘the seventh art.’ During this period, we will focus on identifying and implementing change, allowing the establishment of a new organisation and new mechanisms that take into account the development of the digital world in order to better serve the objectives of the Festival.”

The statement’s omission of a direct reason to cancel led to speculation that the cause was organisational: the festival’s management had dismissed the French company tasked with organising the festival without securing an alternative contract. 

Commenting on the cancellation, the Moroccan film critic Adil Semmar told ARCP: “Festival management did not specify the reasons cancelling the festival this year. Were they material reasons? Organizational? The need to prepare a new vision for the festival after its choices proved ineffective?

“But the cancellation wasn’t surprising to some attendees. The festival’s decline over the past few years increased vocal criticism of its artistic direction, its failure to develop a vision for itself as a platform to promote Moroccan cinema. The organizers therefore had to make a decision. The festival did not renew their contract with the French organization that managed the festival until last season, but did so without finding an alternative to ensure the festival continued.

"The cancellation of this year’s festival is in itself a failure to manage the festival’s transitional period to reinvigorate the festival.

"The festival’s complete reliance on foreign artistic management—since its inception—and its lack of association with the national film and artistic fabric meant it could not establish its roots locally. This meant programming disassociated from the aesthetics and concerns of local audiences and filmmakers. This, in turn, has meant a lack of interest from local audiences and filmmakers in recent iterations of the festival.

“The festival’s strategy—to attract international audiences and create international status without local interest—was not a smart one, especially because of an absence of opportunity to discover locally or even regionally produced cinema, with a near-total absence of southern cinema: Arabic, as well as African.”