Mapping Moroccan neoliberalism: melodrama and realist aesthetics in the films of Hakim Noury

Abstract

Faced with a severe economic crisis and simmering social unrest in the early 1980s, Morocco embarked on a comprehensive IMF-designed programme of socioeconomic structural adjustment. Over the next decades, neoliberal market reforms ushered in new forms of spatial development and social relations in Moroccan cities. In the cultural field, a popular cinema was born in the early 1990s. What I call the New Urban Cinema (NUC) screened the complex structures of everyday life in a globalising society. NUC has anchored national filmmaking in the everyday life and affective economy of a society in transition. The country's largest city, Casablanca has been the setting for most of this cinema's original portrayals of today's Moroccan society. The filmmakers have forced cinema to the forefront of public debate about socioeconomic inequalities and political repression through critical explorations of their mundane enactments and affective economy in everyday life. This article examines two...