Compétition internationale
46th edition
NOVEMBER 15>24, 2024, Nantes - France
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The Breadwinner
(Loqmat 'Aich)

by Mohamed ABBAZI & Donna WOOLF

Cine-Concert 1_Breadwinners

Ready to jump forward, the women wait there like pebbles washed up on the pavements or lean against the walls of streets lined with bourgeois markets in downtown Casablanca. This is the 1960s, the women are Berbers who have left their villages to join the slums of Hay Mohammadi or other districts to earn their living as day cleaners or sometimes prostitutes. Filmed secretly, these highly undesirable images of an underclass in post-colonial Morocco persist, along with their racial, ethnic, social and gender inequalities, in the wake of the uprisings harshly repressed by Hassan II and the imposed “state of emergency”. Unfinished, Mohamed Abbazzi’s Breadwinner (1969) (the French title: La Longue Journée) bears the mark of an epoch. Unearthed as a rough cut and with none of the original directly recorded sound, the raw rendering of this silent but attentive observation of these women without images conveys a violence that crosses time to reach us here and now. JB

  • Titre français
    La Longue Journée
  • Original title
    Loqmat 'Aich
  • Titre international
    The Breadwinner
  • Scénario
    Mohamed ABBAZI, Donna WOOLF
  • Photo
    Mohamed ABBAZI
  • Support de projection
    DCP

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