The view from Marrakech: Jeremy Irons and the best of the festival

Marrakech Film Festival’s slot late in the calendar year is a double-edged sword. Major features may have already premiered at the likes of Cannes, Venice and Toronto to great fanfare, but away from the white heat and global spotlight of these events, films of high quality with a slightly lower profile than the year’s hyped hits get more space. This is particularly true of local and regional titles but also extends to the smattering of English-language stormers.

Away from the on-screen action comprising 76 films from 33 countries, Marrakech attracts an impressive roster of talent. Filmmakers, critics and industry folk from northern European and the northern US states are no doubt lured to the Moroccan city by balmy temperatures and late November sunshine. The chaotic fun of the souks and mellifluous call to prayer, meanwhile, are indelible experiences, wherever you’re from.

This year luminaries including Jim Jarmusch, Leos Carax, Julia Ducournau, Asghar Farhadi, Ruben Östlund and Jeremy Irons sat down for lengthy in-conversation events. Irons made us laugh reminiscing about working with Laura Dern on Inland Empire (2006). He told his audience: “I talked to Laura and said ‘What’s this film about?’ She said ‘I have no idea.’” Despite being baffled by David Lynch’s experimental opus, he remains a fan. He explained: “It’s like sitting in front of a great modernistic painting. It means different things to different people – it’s an extraordinary piece of work.”

In town to receive an honorary Golden Star from the festival, Tilda Swinton joined Joanna Hogg to introduce a special screening of The Eternal Daughter. Capping a trio of consecutive collaborations between actor and director after both parts of The Souvenir, the film sees Swinton play both a writer struggling to get her script written and the writer’s mother. Set in an almost empty hotel in Scotland, the eerie setting and Swinton’s nuanced performances conjure a ghost story of Hogg’s trademark subtlety.

Director Paolo Sorrentino’s jury – which also contained actors Vanessa Kirby, Diane Kruger and Tahar Rahim alongside directors Justin Kurzel, Nadine Labaki and Laïla Marrakchi – awarded Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi’s A Tale of Shemroon the festival’s grand prize. Dehkordi’s tale of partying and drug-dealing in the suburbs of Tehran focuses on reckless Iman (Iman Sayad Borhani) and more balanced older brother Payar (Payar Allahyari). What the film lacks in originality it makes up for in energy. 

The festival’s jury prize (the runner-up slot) went to a pair of films that are among the most distinctive of the year. Alma Viva is a coming-of-age tale unlike any other, seeing young French girl Salomé (Lua Michel) become possessed by the spirit of her grandmother in a small Portuguese village. Full of wild surprises – a rowdy, violent funeral scene is a standout – and adorned by touches of magic realism, Cristèle Alves Meira’s remarkable debut announces the director as one to watch. Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan is 2022’s finest Moroccan film and focuses on a secretly gay master tailor Halim (Saleh Bakri) who lives and works in the town of Salé with his wife Mina (Lubna Azabal). Under pressure to deliver garments sewn diligently by Halim without a machine, the pair take on Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) as Mina’s health deteriorates. It’s a devastating drama, as beautiful as the eponymous garment.

The jury awarded Choi Seung-yoon best actress for her work in Anthony Shim’s heartwarmer Riceboy Sleeps, a tale of single mum So-Young who emigrates from South Korea to Canada in 1990 following the suicide of her young son’s father. Shim carefully balances the practical and emotional struggles of son Dong-Hyun (Ethan Hwang) at school with the quotidian difficulties faced by So-Young in a factory job. Shim’s film has been compared to Lee Isaac Chung’s similarly themed Minari (2020), and it’s as affecting to watch.

Unlucky not to have won any awards, The Taste of Apples Is Red was among the best films here. Ehab Tarabieh’s riveting debut depicts Sheikh Kamel (Makram Khoury), a holy man of the minority Druze community in the Golan Heights. Kamel’s brother Mustafa unexpectedly returns home from Syria with a gunshot wound, having been in Damascus since he left their home abruptly before the Six-Day War in 1967 when Israel captured the heights. This spark re-ignites decades of hurt and leads to shocking revelations, redemption of a sort and a set of intriguing moral dilemmas.

Moroccan-British director Fyzal Boulifa’s second film, The Damned Don’t Cry, is an advance on debut Lynn + Lucy (2019). It sees an itinerant sex worker, Fatima-Zahra, and her teen son Selim settle in Tangier. The poverty-stricken pair are used to living in insalubrious rooms, until an encounter on a building site leads Selim into sex work, while Fatima-Zahra’s hopes are raised by a kindly bus driver. Boulifa gets to the heart of human nature with desire and spite portrayed in a realistic, often painful fashion.

Boy from Heaven, Tarek Saleh’s taut conspiracy thriller set in a powerful Cairo Islamic school, was another stand-out from north Africa, even if Istanbul doubles for the Egyptian capital on screen. Saleh’s story looks at a fisherman’s son, who finds himself wrapped up in a government plot to elect their preferred grand imam as head of the school. Deeply unsettling, but never less than compelling.

Of the major studio fare at the festival, James Gray’s Armageddon Time was the strongest. An autobiographical look at events from Gray’s own upbringing in Queens, New York in 1980, the film sees white Jewish pre-teen Paul make friends with troubled Black boy Johnny. The film is a serious look at race and family that offers laughs, heartbreak and a searing indictment of America’s greatest problems, bolstered by a great support cast that includes Jeremy Strong as Paul’s violent father and Anthony Hopkins, who steals each scene he appears in as grandad Aaron.

The other key American work was Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener. Another intelligent ‘god’s lonely man’ piece that would suit double-bill programming with Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), it features Joel Edgerton as the titular horticulturalist in charge of the gardens at a Louisiana plantation owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver, on flinty form in her best role for years). Edgerton is a calm professional with a semi-secret violent past whose professional and private life becomes upended when Norma’s grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) comes to stay. A mostly quiet, considered film about being haunted by one’s past, its mysteries linger.

Several other rightfully acclaimed arthouse hits screened, with Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer offering vital but despairing looks at the way the world works in modern Iran, mid-19th-century Iceland and France respectively. 

A series of outdoor screenings in Jemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakech’s main square, saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) and even Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) thrill locals and tourists alike. Neither likely amused so much as a lunchtime fracas between two donkeys, who had to be restrained by their human guardians.