Today, Friday, the Tetouan Festival of Mediterranean Cinema launched its twenty-sixth session, which is being held via electronic platforms due to the pandemic of the Corona virus.
The last session of the festival was held in attendance in 2019, after which the prominent artistic event in northern Morocco stopped due to the outbreak of the pandemic, which has killed more than nine thousand people in the country so far, according to official statistics, according to Reuters.
The festival, which runs until June 10, will screen nine feature films from Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, Greece, Turkey, France and Slovenia.
Morocco is represented in this section by the movie (Women of Wing C) directed by Mohamed Nazif and starring Asmaa Al-Hadrami, Jalila Al-Talmisi, Reem Fathi, Fatima Atef and Nasreen Al-Radi.
In the documentary section, the festival will screen six films from Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Turkey, Spain and France. Morocco is represented in this section by the movie (Black Nights in the Seventies), directed by Ali Al-Safi.
The “Free Space” section, which was supervised by the International Federation of Critics (Vibrisi), includes three films from France, Austria and Turkey, while the “Heartbeat” section will show the Italian-French film (The Traitor) and the Spanish film (The Mother).
In his opening speech, the head of the Tetouan Festival of Mediterranean Cinema Foundation, Ahmed El-Hassani, said:
“This session is being held in exceptional circumstances, especially the conditions of the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic, which caused a major crisis in the Moroccan film sector, as cinema halls were closed and are still closed to this day… On this occasion, we ask the Moroccan government to open cinema halls like other European countries and others “.
The festival program includes a symposium on (the future of cinema and film festivals after the Covid-19 pandemic), as well as a lecture by Moroccan director Mohamed Sharif Tribeq, in addition to an exhibition of posters by artist Abdel Karim El Wazzani.