Katia Kameli
An award winner at Barcelona LOOP Fair 2021, The Storyteller, a short film by Katia Kameli. In 2012, this French-Algerian artist travelled to Marrakesh to record Abderahim Al Azalia, a storyteller who was then performing at the Royal Theatre, a building, still under construction at the time, in Marrakesh’s Jamaa-El-Fna square. Kameli’s aim was to retrieve a Moroccan ancestral theatrical tradition of storytellers who would act in that large public square before a circle of spectators known as al-halqa. On this occasion, the storyteller was freely interpreting a Bollywood movie, a very popular genre in the Maghreb. He recounts the plot of Dosti, a 1969 black-and-white film by Satyen Bose about two characters who escape their condition thanks to their close friendship. The film merges Morocco’s oral tradition with Bollywood’s commercial cinema, in a prime example of a meeting of cultures.
