Double Projections | Small Paths - Complex Stories

Double Projections
Re-seeing films and re-‘reading’ them in the context of (post-) colonial history and its repression. Casablanca : when the cinema classic dating from the Second World War begins, one can imagine being in present-day Morocco – with emigrants looking across to Fortress Europe and seeking smugglers to take them to Portugal into a certain kind of safety. 1 Berlin - Harlem , the film, which was made by Lothar Lambert in 1975, can be interpreted as a study on the possibility / impossibility of a German post-colonial modernity: Can one, for example, detect an echo of German colonialism in the sexual (emancipation) fantasies directed at black US soldiers in the West German occupied zone of Berlin? Fake Soldiers : For two blacks with an African background, a performance as cool, rapping GIs becomes their cultural admission ticket into the white german society.

Visual commentaries accompany the screenings of Casablanca and 1 Berlin – Harlem as Double Projections. Afterwards there will be discussions with the respective directors Idrissou Mora Kpai and Lothar Lambert

A programme by Remember Resistance
Remember Resistance (Jochen Becker, Julien Enoka-Ayemba, Sonja Hohenbild, Brigitta Kuster) examines various aspects of German colonial history and the debate with the colonial mentality.

Small Paths – Complex Stories (Petites ruelles - modernitées croisées)
A film series on the cinema as a centre for the creation and circulation of Modernity in Europe and North Africa before and after Morocco gained independence in 1956.

Guests:
Aïcha Osfour: colleague and daughter of the film-maker, producer and film technician Mohamed Osfour (1927 - 2005)
Youssef El Ftouh, film-maker, Le ciné colonial* (1997) and Le noir des blancs (1995); curator of the exhibition L'Afrique au regard du cinéma colonial (Institut du monde arabe 1994, Fespaco 1995)
René Vautier, born in 1928, cinéma militant film-maker. His rigorous commitment to causes saw him supporting resistance in Brittany, the Algerian resistance, the miners’ strike and a wide range of struggles against censorship.

From the archives of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (Rabat), Cinémathèque de Bretagne (Brest), Archives de la Planète/Musée Albert Kahn (Paris), Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv (Berlin), Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto (formerly the Finnish Film Archive, Helsinki), Forum des Images (Paris)

Curators: Brigitta Kuster, Madeleine Bernstorff
The Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) in Rabat, Morocco

The Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) was founded on 9 January, 1944, just two days prior to the publication of the Moroccan Independence Manifesto marking the country's formal declaration of independence from France. The centre's founding director was the Frenchman, Henri Monjeau, who was also the chief press officer for the "Résidence générale." The role of the CCM was seen as not only involving film distribution and the management of the film sector but also the cultivation of a specifically Moroccan cinema. As film scholar Abdelkader Benali (Le cinéma colonial au maghreb, Les Editions du Cerf, 1998) describes it, the promotion of Moroccan film was seen as a way of countering the growing influence of Egyptian cinema and the dissemination of Arab-Islamic nationalisms. The CCM's institutional model was the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC), which was established under the Vichy regime.

We would like to express our thanks to the CCM.