Moroccan Amazigh Cinema and Cultural Heritage

Sheila Petty explores how Amazigh cultural heritage is retained and reflected in Amazigh film produced within Morocco and in its diaspora. In this open access book, she examines the history of Moroccan Amazigh cinema and offers new interpretations of the reflections of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in this cinema through close readings of key films’ narrative and aesthetic properties in concert with their political, historical, cultural, production and reception contexts. Beginning with an introduction to the development of Amazigh film and video since the early 1990s, she discusses how Amazigh film has contributed to discussions of identity politics within the region and in the diaspora as Amazigh filmmakers interrogate the Amazigh experience within the intercultural frame of Arab domination, French and Spanish colonialism and current globalization movements. She proceeds to trace Moroccan Amazigh cinema through to the present day culminating in a review of the afterlives of film, focusing on film festivals as a way of talking back and giving back. Petty analyzes Amazigh’s films’ foundations in oral tradition, their borrowing from literature, painting, theater, and performative gestures to create art-action where representation involves both image and action in order to be sovereign. The book theorizes ways of thinking about time and space that arise from the artist’s cultural heritage, thus asking if it is possible to “Amazighize” cinematic paradigms.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.