Nass El Ghiwane - Taghounja

Taghounja (1980), Moroccan-Italian filmmaker Abdou Achouba’s ode to Sufi poet Abderrahman el Majdoub’s Qasidas starring Larbi Batma and Omar Sayed, two of the members of Nass El Ghiwane, who will also compose the film’s soundtrack. The film charts a quest for identity by two characters: one, a lyricist and musician (Batma), who strives to immerse himself in his country’s rich cultural heritage; the other, a young boy, who looks at the world around him through the eyes of innocence. Bringing to mind Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966), to whom the film is dedicated.

At Omar Sayed’s instigation, Larbi Batma desperately wanders through a mystical Morocco tirelessly collecting oral poetry, sounds and rhythms primarily drawn from popular music and the repertoire of the traditional religious brotherhoods (Gnawa, Aissawa, Heddawa, H’madcha, Jilala, etc.) While classified as fiction, Taghounja is, strictly speaking, a docu-fiction. However, its approach is markedly different from that of Transes (Maanouni’s essay film about Nass El Ghiwane). Instead of a biopic, it dramatizes the group’s lyrics, sometimes literally, within the sociopolitical life of the time. The parallel wanderings of the musician and the child mirroring the state of affairs of late 70s Morocco, a country still alienated by colonialism, neo-colonialism and the perversion of certain customs and traditions. The quest comes to nothing and Abdou Achouba refuses to give audiences an answer, preferring instead an open-ended conclusion.<å> Taghounja was awarded a prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Carthage Film Festival, and was widely acclaimed by French intellectuals and artists. However, the politicised audience of students at the Maison du Maroc in Paris gave Achouba a reserved welcome, reproaching him for not being critical enough of the regime. Moroccan film critic and Abdou’s former philosophy teacher Noureddine Saïl said in his weekly radio program, Écran noir, “You may like or dislike Taghounja, but you have to admit that the film includes certain shots that are on a par with works of art.”