‘Music and dancing is like oxygen...It’s super important’

“I don’t want to say that I can’t live without music,” says Zineb Boujemaa, one of the vibrant young stars of Casablanca Beats. “The real answer is that music and dancing is like oxygen for me. Life without music is a dark place. It’s super important for me, especially as a dancer. And the music inside is just as important as the music you listen to.”

Casablanca Beats is a lively mash-up of docu-drama and hip-hop musical that sees French-Moroccan auteur Nabil Ayouch returning to Sidi Moumen, the Moroccan suburb where he previously shot Horses of God, which dramatised the events leading up to the suicide bombings of 2003. The perpetrators of those attacks – which killed 45 people – came from the shanty towns of Sidi Moumen. It’s also the district where Ayouch founded an arts centre, an institute that takes centre stage in Casablanca Beats.

“In 2003, 12 suicide bombers left Sidi Moumen and went to the centre of Casablanca to commit attacks,” says Ayouch. “It’s always difficult to understand or to try to understand the reasons that would make a 10-year-old boy turn into a suicide bomber. That gave me the feeling that the main thing that they are lacking in this neighbourhood is a place where young people could freely express themselves and tell their own stories. And that’s why right after the shooting of Horses of God, I decided to build the cultural centre that you see in the film and I decided that would be the subject of my next movie.”

Ayouch, who was born in Paris to a Moroccan father and French mother of Jewish-Tunisian descent, knows the value of a youth-welcoming community centre. Growing up in Sarcelles, a less than salubrious Parisian suburb, he found refuge at a local centre where he learned how to sing and tap-dance and where he first watched the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

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“I experienced the same relation with arts with culture, as a way of transforming a young boy or young adolescent that I saw in the centre in Sidi Moumen,” says the director. “I was someone that was full of doubt, that was questioning if I was capable of facing the world. And the arts allowed me to be strong and allowed me to become an actor and later on to become a director. And that’s the reason why I was so moved, moved by each one of the kids in my film. I recognised myself in probably every girl or boy during the filming, because I was watching myself when I was young.”

When you see some big Hollywood movies talking about the Arab world, or Islam, there are no movements and no individuals...It's a mess

Casablanca Beats – or Haut et Fort (Loud and Clear) as it was released in France – concerns a lively group of youngsters growing up in northeastern Casablanca where the local arts centre has taken on a mysterious new teacher and former rapper named Anas (Anas Basbousi). By day Anas instils the revolutionary power of hip-hop – often using merciless critiques – into his charges through the Positive School of Hip-Hop programme; by night he sleeps in his car and hangs around with a stray dog.

“He’s like someone from a Western,” says Ayouch. “You don’t know about his past. You don’t want to love him at the beginning actually: you don’t love him at all. But slowly, you discover the one that is behind the facade, he has a heart and that is here to give something. He is not here to stay, but he will leave his influence.”

Anas’s students are all played by nonprofessionals and use their own names. Working with screenwriter Maryam Touzani and making use of extensive improvisations and fly-on-the-wall camerawork, Ayouch’s film fizzles with the conversations and concerns of its young ensemble. One stern pupil nicknamed Iman reveals that he was once “destroyed” on social media for suggesting that not all Christians are bad. Two girls bust out Islamic feminist rhymes while male classmates warn them to dress demurely. The larger group debate whether or not it is proper to rap about religion.

Their presence is enough to make waves in the larger community. Drawing on a real-life incident outside the arts centre, Casablanca Beats shows angry relatives turning up to protest that: “You teach them filth!”

“The challenge for me in this film was to find a new form of movie that would be in between intimacy, in between the energy of a musical and dance, and also a very realistic, very naturalistic drama that brings you close to the reality that these characters experience every day,” says Ayouch. “That’s why I’ve experimented a lot before finding this form, because it was not easy to make everything click. But the story for me was important. And to be able to express my personal, my autobiographical part in the movie, it had to be very close to their words, their expressions, their reality, what they go home to when they leave every day. That’s what I discovered by preparing.”

Those preparations required three years as the filmmaker went about editing the film in sections. It was a risky strategy but one he was certain would pay off. Even the raps were built slowly and organically, beginning with the cast’s words, assistance from teachers and finally the involvement of French hip-hop veterans Fabien and Mike Kourtzer, who initially came to Morocco for a week and stayed for many months. (“We basically kidnapped them,” laughs Ayouch.)

“I knew I would need three or four years because I knew where to begin but I didn’t know at the time, where to end,” he says. “Actually, the shooting, writing and editing process took more than three years,with periods of editing in the middle. So I built the film in a way that I never did before. I have to admit that I loved it. I love to work like that thanks to the involvement of the youngsters. They were very conscious at the beginning that this would be a long process, and that I wanted to be very close to watching how they grow up and the way they evolve. They kept their energy, their focus, their concentration for the entire period. I was happy for the process to last because they were very cool, cooperative, and collaborative.”

“It was more than joyful,” adds Zineb Boujemaa. “There were a lot of emotions, not only joys, because it was our first movie, our first meeting and in the group, we were so sincere. Once I met the other actors of the class, I thought: oh, we have the same visions and ideas about hip hop and dancing and art in general. I found my family. It was super sweet.”

Ayouch hopes that Casablanca Beats works as an important corrective to the way that the Islamic world is typically portrayed on screen.

“When you see some big Hollywood movies talking about the Arab world, or Islam, there are no movements and no individuals,” he says. “It’s a mess. There are general ideas that the entire world is made of radicals, of extremists, but you don’t know who they are, or where they come from, or the reasons they hold their beliefs. You don’t even know their name sometimes. And it probably gives the world the general idea that the youth of this country, Morocco, that is 70 per cent of the population, are a mass, and they all think the same and they’re all radicalised, and full of religion and so on. And that’s why I wanted to deconstruct this idea by showing, first of all, people with lots of energy, lots of hopes, and I decided to stay in their land to help build their future, although there are obstacles and you can see that in the film, probably more for girls and boys. But they all have very different ways of thinking about life and those obstacles. That was very important for me to show that.”

That idea played very well at the Cannes Film Festival last year, where the Casablanca Beats red carpet before the film’s Official Competition premiere proved as big a draw as jury president Spike Lee’s many-coloured dinner jackets.

“It was an unforgettable experience,” says the director of his third Cannes premiere. “And it was more important for me to see things through the eyes of the young actors than in the screening room, and on the red carpet. For almost all of them, it was the very first time that they had taken or travelled outside Morocco. And for your first destination to be the red carpet at Cannes was something really intense.”

Casablanca Beats opens April 29th