Crossings of Heritage, Memory and Archives: A History of Moroccan Cinema in The Bouanani Archives

Abstract

This article interrogates archival forms and practices in relation to remembering “lost archives” of Moroccan cinematographic history. It presents the Bouanani Archives – a private, fragmented, still largely uncatalogued collection in the Bouanani family apartment in Rabat comprising a variety of texts, visuals, and objects which connect to Morocco’s cinematographic and cultural memory. The archive is the personal legacy of the filmmaker, writer, and artist Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011), his wife Naïma Saoudi (1947-2012), and his daughter Batoul Bouanani (1969-2003), who all worked for the Moroccan cinema. Today it is preserved and cared for by his daughter Touda Bouanani and a group of researchers, curators, and filmmakers. By describing different approaches to this legacy, the article moves back and forth between the metaphor of the lost archive and the material and conceptual work carried out with the Bouanani Archives in order to expand on critical archive theory within the particular context of Moroccan cinematographic memory.