A strange incident took place in the city of Agadir, after a person charged with guarding a cinema objected to showing the Moroccan film “Death for Sale” because it included a “kiss scene”, and replaced it during a period that the cinema officials were absent with a Moroccan comedy film.
This censorship of the film “Death for Sale” by the prominent director Faouzi Bensaïdi, whose premiere dates back to 2011, has nothing to do with any local or national authorities. according to Hespress sources.
This took place when Cinema Sahara in Agadir hosted “Panorama of Moroccan Cinema”, an initiative through which the Agadir’s Communal Council seeks to revive the city’s cinema culture and diversify the cultural offer for the residents and visitors of Agadir, according to a press release by the same entity.
Film critic Said El Mazouari sees such a problem as an indication of a current and future challenge that accompanies the reopening of cinemas that were closed, even if this is “an initiative that we were blessed with, even with our reservations about programming, because this task requires training, but it seems from this instance that it poses an actual problem.
El Mazouari connected what transpired to a rupture between the environment in which cinema was cultivated in Morocco, both before and after independence, through the culture of cinematic clubs, and then the legacy of film festivals, a culture that gradually withered due to the crisis in cinema since the 1980s in favor of flashy practices that celebrate cinema as a show, which caused a large portion of Moroccans to not recognize the radical difference between watching cinema and participating in a show.
With the audience’s limited appetite for cinema and the predominance of watching “comedy in its primary sense” on large screens, the critic talks about the need to create an audience, through education on the culture of the image in schools.
El Mazouari believes that the problem of the Agadir cinema might be exacerbated, especially by the promises of the Ministry of Culture to launch dozens of new cinema theaters.
Although this step is “to remedy the deficit in the halls,” this should be accompanied by thinking about what is no less important than the galleries, supply, and technical equipment, which is the human element that shall undertake the programming and organization of movies, which the critic believes that no one talks about.
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