Tangier & (Re)turn to Fes: A Door to the Sky (1988)

Context: Morocco in the 1980s. Farida Benlyazid experiences several “returns”: a physical one to the postcolonial, political and economic space and culture of Morocco; a Muslim “return of the soul” which sets off her life-long spiritual quest, outside the constraints of religious parameters, and inspires her to compose the auto-fictional script of her first feature film, A Door to the Sky (1988). She directs her first film in Fes—excerpts of Ahmed Bouanani’s diary on the film shoot detail the specific challenges of filmmaking in Morocco at the time. Upon its release, the film is met with controversy in the Muslim world and in the European feminist circles, for different reasons and lauded in the United States, before it becomes a classic in Moroccan cinema. She also writes the script of Mohammed Abderrah-mane Tazi’s Badis (1989).