Ali Essafi

Before the Dying of the Light

Ali Essafi

An amazing journey back in time to Morocco in the seventies, through a colorful collage of jazz music, posters and magazine covers, archive footage and cartoons; from the perspective of the artists, many of whom ended up in jail or disappeared without a trace under the tyranny of King Hassan II.

Ouarzazate Movie

Ali Essafi

Ouarzazate, a small moroccan town lives makes its living on international cinema production. Kundun, Gladiator, all posible versions of the Holy Bible: the whole population works as extras in films they will never see... In the cloakrooms and the casting sets, Ali Essai follows the people of Ouarzazate, its Hollywood dreams and its humiliations.

Al-Hareb

Ali Essafi

Known as the “years of lead,” the 1970s in Morocco were marked by severe police crackdowns on dissent, with arbitrary arrests and detention and torture in secret prisons. To survive, a number of activists lived clandestinely. Essafi uses archival footage to tell the story of Aziz, a 23-year-old activist dreaming of freedom and democracy, who lived under an assumed identity for two years before he was identified and arrested.

Obour al bab assabea

Ali Essafi

Ahmed Bouanani, Naïma Saoudi

Ali Essafi visited Bouanani three years before the latter’s death. The filmmaker, poet and novelist who also made drawings was leading a reclusive life in a remote village with his wife Naïma and many cats, living in the midst of huge piles of books and manuscripts.

Al bab al sabea

Ali Essafi

La Septième Porte is the title of a 300-page film-history work dedicated to Moroccan cinema between 1907 and 1986. It was written by Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011) by hand over many years, but never published. Ali Essafi visited Bouanani three years before his death. Film excerpts, interviews and other documents delineate the artistic universe of a poet, filmmaker and essayist whose independence and integrity remained unsullied until the end.