Mapping Moroccan neoliberalism: melodrama and realist aesthetics in the films of Hakim Noury

Abstract

Faced with a severe economic crisis and simmering social unrest in the early 1980s, Morocco embarked on a comprehensive IMF-designed programme of socioeconomic structural adjustment. Over the next decades, neoliberal market reforms ushered in new forms of spatial development and social relations in Moroccan cities. In the cultural field, a popular cinema was born in the early 1990s. What I call the New Urban Cinema (NUC) screened the complex structures of everyday life in a globalising society. NUC has anchored national filmmaking in the everyday life and affective economy of a society in transition. The country's largest city, Casablanca has been the setting for most of this cinema's original portrayals of today's Moroccan society. The filmmakers have forced cinema to the forefront of public debate about socioeconomic inequalities and political repression through critical explorations of their mundane enactments and affective economy in everyday life. This article examines two films that showcase such new articulations of postcolonial subjectivity in Moroccan urban cinema. Hakim Noury's Massir Imraa (A Woman‘s Fate, 1998) and Qissat hub (A Love Story, 2001) are paradigmatic examples of NUC's realist matrix and political stakes. The films will be closely analysed against the backdrop of contemporary Casablanca as well as the social, economic and political transformations of Morocco in the globalisation era. As I will argue, NUC's postcolonial critique is constructed around a poetics of quotidian attractions, which unveil the residual contradictions and critical potential of everyday life in the city. The ability to draw new cognitive maps of the present and beyond anchors Moroccan cinema in its historical conditions of production and reception.