Farida Benlyazid and Juanita Narboni: Two Women from Tangier

Abstract

This article locates pioneer woman director Farid Benlyazid’s production against the political backdrop of Morocco and its implications for filmmaking from the 1980s to the present. Benlyazid’s multicultural, multilingual upbringing has imbued every single one of her films, from her first short, Identites de femme / Women’s Identities (1979), to Juanita bint Tanga / La Vida perra de Juanita Narboni / La Chienne de vie de Juanita Narboni / The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni (2005), as has her humanist’s feminism. It then argues that The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni is an exceptional film made in Morocco on several levels: its female protagonist, Juanita Narboni, speaks Spanish only, and seems frozen in time, while Tangier evolves and changes around her. The film is as much an ode to multicultural Tangier as it is an adaptation of Angel Vasquez’s novel of the same title. Finally, the film was a translocal Spanish and Moroccan co-production.