When walls collapse! Rethinking the sites of memory in Hakim Belabbes’s Collapsed Walls (2022)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hakim Belabbes’s Collapsed Walls (2022) is an innovative Moroccan film that visually retells a set of stories from the life experience of the filmmaker in the city of Bejaad (Morocco). Grounding our work in transnational cinematic approaches and in cultural studies, our reading of Collapsed Walls attempts to holistically (de)encode the filmic construction of the contextual, the formal, and the thematic narratives that suffuse the film. We shed light on how this film engages with Belabbes’s cinematic style and how the Moroccan cultural identity is reshaped through his poetic filmic narratives. The methodology is bolstered by non-participant observation at the avant-première of the film in Casablanca on 20 May 2022, as well as an interview with the film director. Belabbes was trained in Chicago, where he lives, but the transnationality of his films is blurred by his heavy focus on his hometown, as a source of inspiration and as an iconic representation of his cultural identity. The other main characteristic of the disruptive approach to transnationalism in Belabbes’ films is permeated by what we have dubbed the ‘genre’s transnomadism’, considering the liminal, dialogic and transborder use of genres in Belabbes’ work. Collapsed Walls’ transnational resonances create a disruptive version of experimentation at the heart of the real narrative of the film, creating a knot of contrasts and ambivalent discourses through the negotiation of the real and the unreal, the spiritual and the sublime, the sacred and the profane.