Festival
The latest iteration of the Marrakech International Film Festival – the Arab world’s most important – highlights the triumphs and trials of the human spirit. By Andy Hazel.
2025 Marrakech International Film Festival reveals the contradictions of the city
Before co-founding Marrakech in 1070, Yusuf ibn Tashfin had been busy. The warrior king had pushed back a series of Christian incursions across Spain and North Africa – actions that, historians argue, spared the Muslim world from annihilation. His answer to conflict was not only military but cultural: the creation of a city built around mosques, libraries and the exchange of ideas.
Were Tashfin to visit the city’s many cinemas now, he would recognise the Marrakech International Film Festival as an extension of his intentions – a modern arena where competing ideologies and historical pressures converge and where resistance becomes its own creative force.
This year’s festival jury, led by South Korean legend Bong Joon-ho, includes actors Jenna Ortega and Anya Taylor-Joy and directors Julia Ducournau, Celine Song and Moroccan filmmaker Hakim Belabbes. Asked about the impact of AI on filmmaking, Belabbes offered an answer that encapsulated the festival’s ethos: “The models they use in AI don’t belong to me,” he said. “I have to create my own worlds … otherwise it’s just a new form of colonialism. It’s the whitewashing of our heritage.” The warning that storytelling can be a battleground for ownership reverberates throughout the festival’s most politically charged films.
Morocco’s relative openness makes the festival one of the few uncensored cultural spaces in the region and its programming reflects that freedom. International premieres destined for wider release (Hamnet, A Private Life, No Other Choice) sit beside films that may never see an Australian cinema, such as the restoration of Ahmed Bouanani’s Mirage, a 1979 surrealist odyssey in which a peasant couple’s good fortune leads them into a labyrinth of urban corruption. In a very different register, Oscar Hudson’s Straight Circle follows two enemy soldiers stranded on a desert border so featureless they forget which side they’re defending, tipping the film into a gently deranged, existential comedy.
The opening night film, Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, is based on the not entirely unrelatable true story of a man driven to take his mortgage broker hostage, under the gaze of a police force caught off guard and an encircling television crew. Much of the film’s power comes from its performances, Bill Skarsgård’s livewire gunman, improvising out of his depth, and his broker, played in a wincingly sympathetic performance by Melburnian actor Dacre Montgomery.
As part of the festival’s Conversations program, Jodie Foster inadvertently made global headlines. Before an audience of film students and cinephiles, Foster somehow managed to find new stories about the making of Taxi Driver, despite nearly five decades of variations on “What was it like working with Robert De Niro at 12?” With affectionate candour, the 63-year-old actress described him as “one of our greatest American actors. I’m so proud to have worked with him, but he’s not the most interesting person on Earth. He was very much in character. So, he was really uninteresting. I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’ ”
From these reflections on film history, the festival pivoted back to its forward-looking competition screenings. Competing for the festival’s top prize, the L’étoile d’Or, is Filipino-Australian filmmaker James J. Robinson, who won the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Best Australian Director award in August for his debut feature, First Light.
Robinson’s film follows a nun who witnesses the accidental death of a young construction worker and is gradually drawn into the endemic corruption that allows those responsible to evade accountability. Though few films can match the grace of Robinson’s, a similarly sharp portrait of defying East Asian patriarchy appears in Siyou Tan’s Amoeba, a stylish Singaporean girl-gang comedy about teenagers pushing back against the academic pressures from their elite school, economic disparities and their parents’ expectations. Tan’s film also examines Singaporean national identity while incorporating a ghost story.
Several 2025 titles represent the festival’s preoccupation with true stories of opposition – directly echoing Belabbes’ concern about cultural erasure. Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, set during the 1936 revolt against British colonial rule, is a vivid historical drama that refuses to abstract the origins of Palestinian resistance. Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, spanning three generations of one family, is a moving, precisely observed portrait of inherited displacement and the persistence of hope. More formally adventurous is Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s Landmarks, a vibrant documentary built around the trial of three men accused of murdering an indigenous leader. It’s a bold film whose themes achieve universality by grounding colonial trauma in a single, irreducible loss.
Truth fuels many of the festival’s strongest films, including imaginative and generous works such as Do You Love Me, Lana Daher’s astonishing account of Lebanon’s artistic communities in a country with no national archive. Her film is a glorious bricolage of music, visual art and sound, gaining power precisely because it avoids overt politics while revealing everything politics has shaped.
A similar, quietly accumulating political charge runs through Massoud Bakhshi’s All My Sisters, which follows two siblings in Tehran from 2009 to 2025, and Vladlena Sandu’s Memory, about a girl growing up during the Russian invasion of Chechnya. Both films draw their force from the rhythms of ordinary life, letting small gestures and daily compromises reveal how people navigate and push back against the systems surrounding them.
That intimacy is shattered in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Grand Jury Prize winner at the Venice Film Festival. Constructed around the recording of a phone call from a six-year-old Gazan girl trapped in her family’s car after it was fired upon by an Israeli tank, the film is almost unbearably simple and finds its power in its lack of cinematic adornment.
One of the festival’s best films is the epitome of cinematic adornment. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is a visually rich, savagely funny tale of a South Korean salaryman willing to kill his way to a promotion in the paper industry. Like Parasite, it pivots class anxiety into biting satire, its propulsive editing, saturated colour scheme and delirious violence marking it as one of the finest films of the year.
All of these, and dozens of other films, unspool under the festival’s royal decree: from the animated toddler-oriented adventure Tummy Tom and the Lost Teddy Bear to the searing examination of institutional abuse in Broken Voices, each screening carries the imprimatur “By the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI”. It is a reminder that such a celebration of artistic freedom moves within structures that remain distinctly Moroccan, even as the country presents an image of openness to the world.
The Marrakech International Film Festival feels less like an escape from the country’s complexities than a distillation of them: a place where resistance is applauded even as it is contained. The city around it has always lived with such contradictions – the festival simply makes them visible.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 6, 2025 as "Alternating currents".
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