In 2013, I curated the touring retrospective “Moumen Smihi: Moroccan Mythologies,” managed by Livia Alexander. This program debuted at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, in October 2013. It was then shown at the Block Cinema, Chicago and an extended program (with newly restored versions of Smihi’s films Lady from Cairo and With Matisse in Tangier) screened at the Tate Modern, London in 2014. Some of the films were also screened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Musée des Beaux Arts, Montréal, in conjunction with other programming. I participated in many onstage conversations with Smihi during these events; some of these are archived in the Interviews area of this website.

Born in 1945 in Tangier, Morocco, Moumen Smihi attended film school at the influential IDHEC (L’institut des hautes études cinématographiques) in Paris from 1965 to 1969) and studied with leading French intellectuals including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Deeply influenced by the revolutionary ideas of 1968 Paris and driven by a desire to bring interweave this social and political consciousness with his experience of the Maghreb, Smihi returned to Morocco after making his first film, Si Moh, pas de chance/Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (1971) and has lived between Tangier and Paris ever since. From that stunningly confident debut, which portrayed the conditions of North African immigrant workers in Europe, Smihi went on to make his much-acclaimed first feature, El Chergui, ou, le silence violent/The East Wind (1975). Ever since, he has continued to address contemporary Moroccan realities such as colonial histories, political censorship, religion, and ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity. Smihi’s groundbreaking work, pursued over a long and prolific career, includes documentaries, shorts, and feature-length work made in Morocco, Egypt, and France, as well as five volumes of writing comprising critical interviews, articles on Arab, European, and Hollywood cinemas, and essays on film theory. His work continues to screen internationally and his Tangier trilogy” (A Muslim Childhood, Girls and Swallows, and Tanjawi) screened at the Clair Obscur “Travelling” festival in Rennes, France, in 2017.