Gnaouas | Gnawa Music – Corps et Âme

A pioneer of Moroccan documentary film; producer of Ahmed El Maanouni’s legendary *El Hal / Transes* (1981) about Nass El Ghiwane, which Martin Scorsese had restored decades later specifically for his World Cinema Project; founder of the Paris-based distribution company that first brought a large part of Moroccan and Pan-African cinema to Europe; but above all: creator of the monumental series Maroc, corps et âme, a filmed encyclopedia of Moroccan music that has grown since 1987 and is now considered the most important audiovisual archive of the soundscapes of her homeland.

The HKW is pleased to welcome Izza Génini in person to Berlin, following the screening of two films that read like two chapters of a single book.

She directed the first one herself: Gnaouas (1989), the very first film dedicated exclusively to Gnawa music—a journey somewhere between Marrakech and Essaouira, documented in that rare blend of ethnographic precision and cinematic tenderness that has become the hallmark of her entire series.

The second is Frank Cassenti’s Gnawa Music – Corps et Âme (2010), awarded the SACEM Prize in 2011, which picks up the thread two decades later: a musical road trip from Tangier to Essaouira, featuring the unforgettable Maalem Mahmoud Guinia—now a legend in his own right, having passed away in 2015—along with Majid Bekkas and other great masters of the tradition. That Cassenti echoes the title of Génini’s own series as a subtitle is no coincidence, but a logical continuation: the same devotion to sound as the bearer of a culture, the same patience in the face of mystery. Following the screening, there will be a conversation with Izza Génini, one of the most important voices through which Morocco has portrayed itself.