I am currently consulting with the filmmaker to enable better access to his work internationally; please check back here or contact me for more information.
All films listed below as “available for rental” may be programmed for classroom use or other screenings. For more information, please contact limbrick [at] ucsc [dot] edu or use the Contact page on this website.
Si Moh, the Unlucky Man [Si Moh, pas de chance] (1971) 17min.
Shot in Paris after Smihi completed film school, Si Moh is an investigation of the life of migrant workers in France. Connected back to the Maghreb by postcards and to his fellow migrants by shared experiences of alienation, the character Simoh negotiates the industrialized suburbs of Paris as the subject of Smihi’s intimate camera.
- Available for rental in DVD and BluRay. In French and Moroccan Arabic, with English subtitles
Colors on Bodies [Couleurs aux corps] (1972) 20min.
In an impressionistic fashion without commentary or interviews, Smihi follows the work of the painter and educator, Arno Stern, who established the Closlieu studio in Paris and has spent a lifetime with “Painting play” workshops for children and adults. The surviving 16mm is in poor shape and not currently available for viewing.
The East Wind [El-Chergui wa samt al-ʿanif/El Chergui ou le silence violent: vent d’est] (1975) 80min.
“For El Chergui, my initial motivation was to try to discern through cinema certain aspects of Moroccan society at a moment in its history” (Smihi). In the mid-1950s, Tangier was still an International Zone. Smihi’s film presents the city at the eve of its independence, as Aïcha resorts to magical practices to try to prevent her husband from taking a second spouse. Around her, a society of women creates its own form of active resistance even as the larger independence movement grows around it. Through a structure of montage and opposition, Smihi’s arresting images present a society torn by the contradictions of colonialism, religion, patriarchy, and resistance.
- 35mm print, in Moroccan Arabic with French subtitles, available for rental. English subtitles can be provided for live projection over the film. Imago Films, Paris.
44 or Tales of the Night [44 aw usturat al-layl/44, ou, les récits de la nuit] (1981] 110min.
Shot in exceptionally beautiful widescreen images by Pierre Lhomme, 44 presents a fresco of Morocco’s 44 years of colonization as a protectorate of France. With the sweep of Miklos Jansco’s historical films and a mise-en-scène that owes much to Visconti’s The Leopard, 44 tries to capture the sumptiousness and misery of a religious family from Fes and an impoverished family in Chefchaouen, within a society fighting for its independence. Smihi draws equally on the traditions of the Arabian Nights tales and the picaresque narratives of James Joyce in order to present multiple points of view on a complex and mobile national history.
- 35mm print in Moroccan Arabic and French with English subtitles available to rent, Imago Films, Paris.
Caftan of Love [Quftan al-hub lemnaqat bi al hawa/Caftan d’amour, constellé de passion] (1989) 90min.
Based on a story by Mohammed M’rabet, as translated by Paul Bowles (The Big Mirror), Smihi’s film is a complex, Buñuelian tale of fantasy, death, and intrigue shot in rich colors.
- 35mm print in Moroccan Arabic with French subtitles at the CCM, Morocco.
Egyptian Cinema: Defense and Illustration [Taqarir mawjaza ʿan al-sinima al-masriyya/Cinéma égyptien: défense et illustration] (1989). 52min.
A documentary on the history and importance of Egyptian Cinema featuring interviews with important filmmakers such as Tawfik Saleh, Mohammed Khan, Salah Abu Seif, and others.
The Lady from Cairo [Sayyidat al-Qahira/La dame du Caire] (1991) 90min.
In 1990, Moumen Smihi briefly re-located to Cairo in order to work in the shadow of one of the world’s largest commercial film industries. The film that resulted from his Cairo sojuourn is a complex, painterly critique of the Egyptian musical and cinema star system. The Lady from Cairo follows the fate of Amina, a peasant woman who moves to Cairo to seek her brother (who has become entangled in the terrorist underworld) and stays on to become a famous singer. The film shows the divergent states of possibility or despair faced by men and women within a changing Egyptian society. Smihi’s film plays out over thirty years and the events of the Nasserite years and the Palestine / Israel conflict become integral to the narrative. By blending newsreel footage with his own lush cinematography, Smihi creates a complex portrait of contemporary Egyptian society in the post-war years.
- DVD and BluRay available for rental, in Arabic with English subtitles.
With Matisse in Tangier [Avec Matisse à Tanger] (1993) 52min.
- BluRay available for rental, subject to special conditions. Please contact Peter Limbrick for more information. In French with English subtitles.
The Medina of Paris: Supererogatory Prayer by a Muslim Dignatory—My Father—After Landing at Paris-Orly. [La médina de Paris: Prière surérogatoire d’un dignitaire musulman—mon père—après atterrissage à Paris-Orly] (1996). 1min.
In 1995, Smihi was commissioned by the GREC (Groupe de recherches et essais cinematographiques) to join other filmmakers in making short, one-minute films in the style of the Lumière brothers’ actuality films, to commemorate the centenary of cinema.
The Medina of Paris: A square during the Ramadan Market. [La médina de Paris: Une place lors du Souk de Ramadan] (1996) 1min.
In 1995, Smihi was commissioned by the GREC (Groupe de recherches et essais cinematographiques) to join other filmmakers in making short, one-minute films in the style of the Lumière brothers’ actuality films, to commemorate the centenary of cinema.
Moroccan Chronicles [Waqaʾaʿ maghribiyya/Chroniques marocaines] (1999) 70min.
In this film, set in the ancient city of Fez, a mother, abandoned by her husband who has emigrated to Europe, tells three tales to her just-circumcised ten-year-old son. In the first, in which Smihi re-stages the Marrakesh market scene from Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a monkey trainer makes children dance for the tourists. In the second, two lovers meet on the ramparts of Orson Welles’s Essaouira locations for Othello (1952), talking about their own forbidden love. And in the third, set in Smihi’s home town of Tangier, an old sailor dreams of vanquishing a sea monster: the Gibraltar ferry that connects Europe to Africa. In his deconstructed stories of Morocco, Smihi presents generations of masculinities stolen away by the various demands of economic necessity, religion, tradition, and colonization.
- 35mm print in Moroccan Arabic and French with English subtitles available to rent. Imago Films, Paris.
A Muslim Childhood [El ayel: tufula mutamarrida/Le gosse de Tanger: une enfance rebelle] (2005) 83min.
This film, the first in what has become a kind of semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, follows the everyday experiences of a young, timid, pre-teen, boy, Mohamed Larbi Salmi, who grows up trying to make sense of the gentle religious upbringing of his father, the secular education offered him in French school, and his budding desires for the forbidden pleasures of the cinema and those he meets through it. All the while the film offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier–an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Amazigh, European, and American histories. “Between Proustian nostalgia and the ‘autobiographical fiction’ as expressed by Charles Dickens, [the film] wants to be part elegy and part anthropology (via image and sound) of a Muslim childhood in Morocco” (Smihi).
- 35mm print available to rent. In Arabic and French, with English subtitles. Imago Films, Paris
Girls and Swallows [Al-khutaʿif ʿadhara wa sununu/Les cris de jeunes filles des hirondelles] (2008) 80min.
The second in the trilogy of stories devoted to the young Tanjawi (Tangerian) Larbi Salmi, Girls and Swallows restricts itself again to a succession of small stories found across the medina and ville nouvelle of Tangier, as Larbi experiences American and French pop culture, his own polymorphous nascent sexuality, and the different world views offered by his religious and secular educations. Starting from these small narratives, the film opens out onto much bigger questions about the relationship of the sacred and sacrilegious, religion and politics, gender roles, sexuality, and freedom of thought within Arab-Islamic societies.
Sorrows of a Young Tangerian [Tanjawi, ahlam wa ahzan al-tanjawi al-shab alʿArabi al-Salmi/Tanjaoui: peines de Coeur et tourments du jeune tanjaoui Larbi Salmi] (2013) 95min.
Continuing the tales of Larbi Salmi, Sorrows of a Young Tangerian is set in the early years of Moroccan independence in the 1960s. Full of revolutionary romanticism and also influenced by western culture in his final years at high school, Salmi declares his atheism to his religious father, but hides from everyone his love for his English teacher, a beautiful young woman from Paris. Larbi gets involved in the Moroccan student political movement, and only a miracle saves him from the repressive crackdown that his friends must suffer. Shot in startling long takes, the film is Smihi’s boldest statement yet on religion and political histories in Morocco.
- 35mm print in Arabic and French, English subtitles. Imago Films, Paris.
With Taha Hussein [Avec Taha Hussein] (2015) 87min.
An intimate, personal testimony about the intellectual life of one of Smihi’s most cherished cultural figures, the Egyptian writer and scholar Taha Hussein. Smihi speaks at length about Hussein’s life and work, and includes an interview with Hussein’s granddaughter, Amina Taha Hussein.