Marrakech festival spotlights tensions animating Morocco’s movie industry [Video]

MARRAKECH – After the movie “Cabo Negro” screened at the Marrakech International Film Festival this week, organizers anticipating backlash whisked its crew away and canceled screenwriter-director Abdellah Taia’s scheduled post-film Q&A.

The film — selected as one of the festival’s 70 features and approved by authorities to be shot in Morocco — is a queer tale of two young men spending a summer on a beach in the north of the country.

“I am Moroccan. I am gay. And I always have wanted to put the reality of Moroccan gays in cinema,” Taia said, introducing the film at a screening last week. “The love that I never got growing up, I invented it; I created it; and I put it in ‘Cabo Negro’ to give it to today’s Moroccan youth.”

Sixteen years after Taia came out in Moroccan media and 11 years after he released his first film with gay protagonists, …