ALI ZAOUA
Chale Nafus
Director of
Programming, Austin Film Society
With ALI ZAOUA, French Moroccan
filmmaker Nabil Ayouch has added another unforgettable film to the rapidly
growing list of movies focused on the lives of street children. Luis Bunuel’s
LOS OLVIDADOS (THE FORGOTTEN ONES, 1950) was one of the earliest films to
provide an unflinching look at poor children and teens and their harsh lives in
a Mexico City slum. Certainly the American film DEAD END (1937) and others like
it during the Great Depression showed how street toughs could be lured into a
criminal life because of poverty, but Hollywood insisted that there be a moral
message that argued the standard “Crime Does Not Pay.” Italian neo-realists
felt no compunction to tack on any silly messages in films like SHOESHINE
(1946), which showed the effects of postwar poverty on homeless Italian children eventually
turned into criminals by society. The flurry of American juvenile delinquent
films in the 50s started with REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which ironically was set
in an idyllic middle class suburb, but the kids had cars, lots of time,
expendable income, and a will to live dangerously. They refuted the idea that
criminality came from poverty.
Hector Babenco’s
PIXOTE (1981) took viewers back to the hopeless world of LOS OLVIDADOS, but now
sex, drugs, and guns were added. The title character had already killed four
people by the time he was ten years old. This Brazilian film practically
rewrote the book on the portrayal of street children, simply by mirroring the
dreadful realities of homeless runaways/throwaways. Hundreds of subsequent
films revealed youth gangs throughout the world, some sympathetically, others
with horror, revulsion, and fear. The state of childhood had obviously become
perilous in the latter part of the 20th century.
Looking around
in Casablanca, Nabil Ayouch saw that the tragic scourge of gangs of children
had arrived even in this Muslim kingdom. Out of his investigations and
observations would come ALI ZAOUA (2000). With his film’s allusions to child-rape,
another tragic and yet realistic element has been added to the cinematic
depiction of kids living on the streets in gangs, banded together for survival
but also subservient to the demands of their leader. In the midst of this abuse
and dominance, Ali Zaoua has indeed seemed like a prince to his three followers
who join him in leaving Dib’s gang of rag-tag, scarred, dirty, maimed kids.
Ali’s lies about his pre-street life seem to be an attempt to fit in, because
in reality, his prostitute mother truly loved him and gave him his own
comfortable room. Her profession, not lack of love, drove him out. For the
others, the streets must have been preferable to beatings, restrictions, and
abuse at home. But they pay a high price for what initially seems like freedom
from having to go to school or getting a job. In the street they can do as they
wish until they are hungry or need a place to sleep or have to submit to a more
powerful leader.
To escape the
cruel demands of Dib, Ali, Kwita, Omar, and Boubker leave to try to survive on
their own. The charismatic Ali charms them with tales of becoming a sailor and
leaving for an island with two suns. It will be up to his friends, especially
Kwita, to try to get Ali to that dream island in some way. It is Ali’s dream and his friends’
unwavering attempts to make it come true that prevent ALI ZAOUA from becoming
an overwhelmingly depressing and hopeless film. There are moments of pure
beauty in their lives, moments of joy and release from horror and hunger, and
occasional little acts of kindness and love that stand out in such stark relief
from the dirt, poverty, violence, anger, and hopelessness that abound around
the children. The proverbial flower in the garbage heap is always more
beautiful than one in a field of green because of the contrast. That is what
Ayouch has brilliantly and poignantly achieved with ALI ZAOUA.
In a long
interview the filmmaker has much to say about his attraction to telling this
story of Casablanca street kids: “In the lives of these children, there is a
portion of violence and crudeness which is part of their social reality, and
there is also a portion of the imagination, suffused with dream. The street has
a power that is both tragic and lyrical, a power that is maintained by the
imagination of these children. At the drop of a hat, they can take off into
real fantasy.”
He doesn’t
romanticize them though, because even a few preliminary meetings showed how
devious they had learned to be. Having a well dressed adult come show interest
in them was always suspicious and generally short-lived – just long enough to
get a story for a newspaper or a few minutes for a TV news program. Ayouch
explains, “From the moment that one becomes interested in them, they
manipulate, lie, and distort reality. To an extent that’s what happened during
the first week when I went down into the street with my camera. When they saw
me turn up, everything that they let me see was false. I quickly changed my
approach, starting to leave my camera aside, and just kept returning, attaching
myself to them. They saw that they weren’t going to shake me off in a few
seconds like the usual journalist, that this work would tell a story that
emerged from them. The more that went on, the more I observed them, the less I
posed questions. They were used to people coming to them in a one-time manner,
not as part of an ongoing, constructive process; generally, the solutions that
were offered them were just plastering over their problems, not getting at the
essence, so it was too much to expect them to be honest.”
Since he decided
to cast the actual street children, replete with their all-too-real scars, (except for well-known French actor
Saïd Taghmaoui, who plays the evil Dib), Ayouch pondered how much acting
methodology he should impart: “It was difficult to introduce acting rules to
them from the moment that we wanted them to learn technique. It was during the
preparation phase that I realized the extent to which they were in fact actors,
actors in life of course, but also actors pure and simple. I therefore told
myself that there was really no need to teach them anything. However, there are
technical constraints and considerations that a child naturally wouldn’t know
about. We tried to adapt the kids to these limitations, but without success:
they are not adaptable to this kind of constraint, given that they live in a
world of complete freedom. We therefore tried the opposite tack: to adapt the
film to the children. We weren’t necessarily more successful there: for example,
when one of them took off for three days, we couldn’t simply wait around with
nothing to do, since there were production issues; despite everything, a film
remains in the end an economic machine.”
Somehow, it all came together,
though in fits and starts, especially when the kids themselves seemingly began
to understand the story that was being told through them. Ayouch explains, “…
there was a moment where everyone began to internalize the other reality of the
film, the non-economic one–the reason we were there, the real story that we
were telling, and the attempt to pull from that story its ultimate purpose.
Things then began to go better. The constraints, which had been so difficult
for them to bear, actually became things that saved them. The children began to
cling to these rules and agreements like lifesavers, things that could help
them to move forward, to get out of their yo-yo life that was a series of ups
and downs. Besides, this is what traumatized me during the preparation phase of
the project. With these children, as I was inserting myself into their world, I
felt that things would be going well, and we were being filled with hope. But
then everything could collapse in a second’s glance, a thought. The next day,
it’s over, he’s become someone different. The challenge of the film, which was
in a sense to freeze them, gave them a goal, something completely new for
them.”
Ayouch’s
decisions to shoot the film in CinemaScope and insert bits of animation were
carefully thought out. His reason for the wide-screen look was just as
practical as aesthetic: “Cinemascope virtually imposed itself by the setting:
there is always this horizontal quality about the port, with its 360-degree
perspective, where Dib’s gang hung out. On top of that, Cinemascope always
gives a kind of universality to the style. Without forgetting of course that
these kids are always moving around a lot in the frame. Giving them more
horizontal space gave them more freedom.”
Interestingly
the addition of lyrical moments of animated fantasy (based on Kwita’s imagined
version of Ali’s dreams of being a sailor) came from working with the street
kids. The director says, “We presented this film project to them as a workshop,
around which we created other workshops, in order to put a little distance
between them and the film–we always told them that there are other things in
life more important than cinema. We therefore did workshops on sport, singing,
and painting. I don’t know why, but they quickly gravitated towards painting.
Perhaps because it was something truly new for them. We had hoped during the
writing of the script to be able to move beyond realism, but we didn’t know
just how to accomplish that until then. We were able to pursue this idea by
giving the kids’ drawings to Folimage, an animation studio whose films I like a
great deal.”
A question that
has most recently been asked of Danny Boyle after the worldwide financial and
critical success of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE was also asked of Ayouch. What is the
director’s obligation to street children after making a movie using them as
performers? The French Moroccan director replies, “It’s a question that I
continue to ask myself. I always tell myself no, just as I always said the same
to them. My role as a filmmaker ends with my film. If it can provoke a societal
debate, as has been the case in Morocco since the opening of the film, so much
the better; but from then on it’s the civil society that must take up the
baton. I often told them that the film was a chapter in their lives, that those
who wanted to escape from their current circumstances could use the film as a
springboard, in part because they were paid for their work. Those who wanted to
return to the streets after the film, that was their problem: we cannot spend
our lives running after them. Happily, for the majority, the street was no
longer a life-choice for them. But when I hear that one of them does slip back,
I can’t help but take that as a personal setback. Professionally speaking, I’ve
already left this experience by accepting another, somewhat lighter project. I
had at first refused that project, but then went back to it precisely to help
me to gently remove myself from this one. On a personal level, I don’t have any
desire to place psychological barriers between myself and that period in my
life. I remain present with them, being there for them when they call me, but
at the same time I am trying to initiate another level of relationship with
them.”
Perhaps
unsurprisingly Hicham Moussoune, who plays the natural clown Boubker, was able
to parlay his ALI ZAOUA role into another one, as Pipo in a Moroccan TV sitcom,
but the IMDB credit indicates nothing for him after 2003. Ayouch says that many
of the other kids work in the markets or are still in the street. After
Fernando Ramos da Silva, the star of Babenco’s PIXOTE, reverted to real-life
street-crime, he didn’t reach his 20th birthday before being killed
by the police in Sao Paulo. A movie based on his life, WHO KILLED PIXOTE?,
suggested that the director, who pulled da Silva out of the slums to become an
international “movie star” for a short time, was somehow responsible for the
young boy and should have done more to insure his real-life escape from his
surroundings. Danny Boyle, surrounded by the kids from Mumbai at the Academy
Awards, was somehow a disturbing image. A night in Hollywood does not change a
life. In short, directors who make films about and with actual street kids need
to think through what they are doing, why, and for how long? Are they there to
exploit, to draw attention to a problem, or to make a difference in a few
lives?
In this case,
Ayouch says that the kids from his film have never told him what they think of
it, “but they are proud of what they’ve done. Especially because their families
have seen it, because people have seen them. People have given them time
and paid attention to them, which they never really had until then, beyond the
few seconds at a red light when they were selling their Kleenex. For an hour
and a half, people were enclosed in a room solely for them. This necessarily
has allowed their sense of self, their dignity, their self-respect to be
reborn. I think that is their most beautiful victory.” Maybe that’s the most
that can be expected.
Sources