ABSTRACT
‘The film of all taboos’, it was called by its sympathisers. In the late spring of 2006, a controversial new film named Marock was all over the Moroccan papers and culture magazines. Made by a 29-year-old Moroccan woman named Laila Marrakchi, who had left Casablanca for France a decade earlier, the film was released in Morocco on 10 May 2006, a year after it had premiered at the Cannes film festival, and a month after its general release in France. These dynamics—a director with a Moroccan upbringing but a French address, and a film about Morocco with French funding and a European provenance—would haunt the film. In Morocco, its arrival on local screens was heralded with the sort of media coverage of an American succès de scandale, with the free publicity from excessive news coverage obviating the need for paid advertising. Indeed there were multiple parallels to Hollywood films, both within the film itself with its Hollywood look and American teen movie soundtrack, and in its wide distribution via both formal and informal circuits. Soon after its run at cinemas in Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and Marrakech, contraband copies of the film were available for sale on the sidewalks of Moroccan cities, where it stood alongside pirated copies of Hollywood blockbusters such as Syriana, Jarhead, Spielberg's Munich, Ice Age 2 and Cars, to name those with the broadest informal circulation in June—July 2006. 1 But if part of the surprise about Marock's reception in Morocco was just how Hollywood it all seemed, the controversies it provoked in Morocco revolved around the representations of Moroccan particularity within it. That was the problem.
