WINDHOEK– AfricAvenir Windhoek and the Goethe-Centre will present the Namibian film premiere of The Miscreants by Mohcine Besri tomorrow at the Goethe Centre here.
The screening will focus on the filmmaking country, Morocco.
The Miscreants are on the order of their spiritual leader. Three young Islamists kidnap a group of actors who are about to go on tour with their latest show. When the kidnappers arrive at the place of detention, they find themselves cut off from their most closely held conviction and prejudices are challenged.
Born in Meknes, Morocco, in 1971, the Director of The Miscreants, Besri is a winner of best Arab Feature, Cairo International Film Festival in 2012. He studied Physics and Chemistry at the Faculty of Rabat, while making his first steps in the arts by playing small parts in various movies. He later left for Swatzerland where he completed his bachelor degree in computer science and worked in finance, before becoming a mathematics teacher. In parallel, he pursued his passion for cinema and became a script writer and director. Further to several experience as Assistant Director, he directed two short films, was a co-writer of Operation Casablanca with Swiss director Laurent Negre, before writing his first feature film “Les Mecreants”.
The Miscreants won the prize for best work at the National Film Festival in Tangier. In the 35th Cairo International Film Festival in November 2012, after a week of film screenings dampened by ongoing political protest against Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s latest decree and the country’s draft constitution, and a day after bloody clashes between pro and anti-Morsi protesters near the presidential palace, the jury of the Arab Feature Film Competition awarded its top prize to The Miscreants, promoting dialogue between Islamist and liberal members of society.
The filmmaker about his film: “On the one side … men who can’t stand their daily conditions and the absence of a better future’s perspective, lost within Morocco, a country in total upheaval trying to embrace modernity; that modernity they refuse and oppose vehemently, shutting themselves off in religious obscurantism.
On the other side … men and women, from respective backgrounds, bearing the same lot, fighting the same corruption, but to whom modernity is neither a gadget, nor a political tagline. Taking advantage of the glimpse of freedom trickling from the country’s changes, their cultural activism is not more efficient than the former’s religious extremism, but by acting openly, it is (nevertheless0 beneficial.
These two sides don’t usually get to truly meet, their respective prejudice against their opponents preventing each to see the human being under the long beard or the mini-skirt. The Miscreants proposes such a meeting; with seven days of forced proximity, certainty invariably leads to doubts, because they are each unique human beings, and mostly because their common denominator outweighs their differences.
The Miscreants offers an inventory on the eve of a certain Arabic Spring, which to me is only a logical follow-up, in countries where people, like everywhere else, only aspire to one single thing, live in peace with dignity.”
By Sabina Elago