Casablan­ca Beats

In an attempt to por­tray the lives of under­rep­re­sent­ed Moroc­can youth, direc­tor Nabil Ayouch sets his eighth fea­ture in an arts cen­tre which he co-found­ed in Casablanca’s neglect­ed sub­urb of Sidi Moumen.

Ayouch means well, inter­pret­ing the teens’ con­nec­tion to rap music as emblem­at­ic of a rebel­lious spir­it, yet deep­er dis­cus­sions on oth­er social issues – pol­i­tics, women’s rights, reli­gion – are unfor­tu­nate­ly reduced to mere sources of frus­tra­tion, either end­ing abrupt­ly or remain­ing incomplete.

The film’s sav­ing grace, though, is the cast of non-pro­fes­sion­al teenagers play­ing fic­tion­alised ver­sions of them­selves. They have a charm­ing rap­port with their teacher, the for­mer rap­per Anas (Anas Babousi), who sets up a hip hop pro­gramme, though its uncer­tain whether you should be root­ing for him when he so often comes across as arro­gant and self-aggrandising.

He teach­es them the impor­tance of self-expres­sion and its poten­tial to unshack­le younger gen­er­a­tions from ret­ro­gres­sion, and this becomes the film’s main premise, which is a mes­sage that’s far too sim­plis­tic to dis­tract from oth­er shortcomings.

Over a decade has passed since a wave of anti-gov­ern­ment upris­ings inspired a great hope that democ­ra­cy would flour­ish across the MENA region, and while the Arab Spring failed to bring old real­i­ties to an end, the spir­it of protest per­sists through cul­tur­al forms of resis­tance. Casablan­ca Beats, despite its faults, stands as tes­ta­ment to that tenacity.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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