https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2934-0108
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ABSTRACT
Hakim Belabbes’s Collapsed Walls (2022) is an innovative Moroccan film that visually retells a set of stories from the life experience of the filmmaker in the city of Bejaad (Morocco). Grounding our work in transnational cinematic approaches and in cultural studies, our reading of Collapsed Walls attempts to holistically (de)encode the filmic construction of the contextual, the formal, and the thematic narratives that suffuse the film. We shed light on how this film engages with Belabbes’s cinematic style and how the Moroccan cultural identity is reshaped through his poetic filmic narratives. The methodology is bolstered by non-participant observation at the avant-première of the film in Casablanca on 20 May 2022, as well as an interview with the film director. Belabbes was trained in Chicago, where he lives, but the transnationality of his films is blurred by his heavy focus on his hometown, as a source of inspiration and as an iconic representation of his cultural identity. The other main characteristic of the disruptive approach to transnationalism in Belabbes’ films is permeated by what we have dubbed the ‘genre’s transnomadism’, considering the liminal, dialogic and transborder use of genres in Belabbes’ work. Collapsed Walls’ transnational resonances create a disruptive version of experimentation at the heart of the real narrative of the film, creating a knot of contrasts and ambivalent discourses through the negotiation of the real and the unreal, the spiritual and the sublime, the sacred and the profane.
Acknowledgments
This work has benefited a lot from the ‘Transnational Screens’ rigorous reviewing process. We would like to thank Will Higbee wholeheartedly for his expert advice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2. The film won the Grand Prize at the 2017 Tangier National Film Festival.
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Notes on contributors
Lidia Peralta García
Lidia Peralta is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Faculty of Communication and Documentation (University of Granada), Spain. One of her main research areas focuses on the migration and gender narratives in the media and cinema. In 2013, she defended a doctoral thesis on the representation of sub-Saharan migrations through Spanish cinema. This line of research has been complemented with the study of the migration phenomena in Moroccan cinema, a field where she is extensively contributing to open an incipient academic topic in Spain. Among her publications are Los nuevos héroes del siglo XXI. Las migraciones subsaharianas vistas por el cine en España y África (UOCPress, 2016) and Migrando por el cine marroquí (Fragua, 2018). She uses cultural and postcolonial studies to examine films as venues for resistant knowledge formations in order to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice.
Lhoussain Simour
Lhoussain Simour is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Hassan II University of Casablanca-Morocco, and Senior Research Associate at the University of Gibraltar. His research interests center around cultural studies, colonial discourse analysis, performance studies, postcolonial literatures, Moroccan cinema, migration studies, popular culture. He has published extensively on these issues in international journals. He is the author of Recollecting History beyond Borders: Captives, Acrobats, Dancers and the Moroccan-American Narrative of Encounters ((New Castle: Cambridge Publishing Scholars, 2014). Larbi Batma, Nass el-Ghiwane and Postcolonial Music in Morocco (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, Oct. 2016). The Construction of Marginalities and Narrative Imaginary in Mohamed Zafzaf’s Texts: The Postcolony in Secrets and Intimacies (Maryland: Lexington Books Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2022).