The Blind Orchestra

+Morocco

Saturday, 10/1 at St. Anthony Main Theatre
2:45 p.m.

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The Blind Orchestra / جوق العميين

Mohamed Mouftakir
narrative feature / drama / comedy
112 mins / 2014
Morocco / France
Arabic with English subtitles
Minnesota premiere
DCP

With introduction by Hakim Abderrezak.

The Blind Orchestra is a lighthearted and funny drama that follows a violin player, Houcine, and his young son Mimou, who falls in love with an older girl that cleans the house across the way. Houcine’s band pretends to be blind in order to play at conservative weddings, which turns out to be part of a much bigger scandal. Set during the early days of the reign of King Hassan II, The Blind Orchestra offers an intriguing look at Morocco’s recent past by focusing on class, love, and the politics of a country in transition.

Festivals and Awards
*Tanit d’Or, Carthage Film Festival, Tunisia, 2015
*The Golden Wihr, International Festival of Oran Arab Film, Algeria, 2015
*International Film Festival of Marrakech, Morocco, 2015
*Francophone Film Festival, Athens, Greece, 2016

Mohamed Mouftakir, born in 1965, is a Moroccan director. After studying English literature, he became interested in cinema and first worked as an assistant director for several Moroccan and international directors. He has made five short films, and his first feature film, Pegase, won the Grand Prize at FESPACO African Film Festival.

Hakim Abderrezak is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. He teaches in the Department of French and Italian. His research focuses on Mediterranean, Maghrebi, Postcolonial and Francophone studies. He is the author of Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music, which was published this year. This book as well as the major part of his work examines representations of clandestine sea crossings in literary and artistic works that have appeared in French, Arabic, Spanish and Italian. It also looks at how clandestine migrants, refugees and European nationals of Arab descent have been treated in mainstream media and political discourse. He has contributed chapters and published articles in such journals as SITES: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Expressions maghrébines and the Journal of North African Studies, and co-edited a special issue of Expressions Maghrébines on Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian literature written in languages other than French and Arabic.