Nizar Al-Farawi - Marrakesh

Mustafa and Rashid hit a special date, not to visit the headquarters of the local association that provides services to blind people, but rather to live unique moments called discovery and magic in front of a big screen, thinking that it is impossible for those who have lost the same grace of vision.

This happened at the Palais des Congrès, the center of events for the Marrakech International Film Festival, which took place from November 29 to December 7, as visitors from Moroccans and foreigners turned to the sight of passing groups of blind and blind young men and women, towards the hall designated by him. Organizers of audiovisual presentation films to benefit dozens of this category.

Here, the festival records its leadership as the first African and Arab cinema forum hosting the blessing of sight to share the joy of cinema.

The first show ends, childish smiles and mutual comments about an experience closer to the dream they lived in the space of art favor with its human and social depth, and opened the doors of the seventh art, or at least some of them, in front of this slide that lost the light of vision without losing the depth of feeling and the heat of observation and interaction with narration the world.

The tradition is renewed with each session to become a dedicated title since its inception in the 2008 session, through the experience of reproducing a Moroccan film that destroyed all numbers at the box office level, to expand the scope of the experience and its choices vary one session after another.

Scorsese and Farda who showcased some of their masterpieces in this paragraph (Al Jazeera)

Story thread lighting
Thanks to this initiative, this category of people with special needs has been allowed to discover different dramatic worlds that included many world-class masterpieces crowned by leading directors such as Martin Scorsese, Michael Haneke, Bill Auguste and the late Agnes Farda among others.

The audio description process includes an audio comment that provides a smart explanation of the scenes, spaces, movements, and faces that are included in the film visually outside the scope of the dialogue, and the descriptive voice interferes to highlight them in order to help the blind or visually impaired to control the largest portion of the film's narrative path and its dramatic content, without touching the audio tape The original of the film and its artistic structure.

In other words, what the blind person does not see is transmitted to his hearing so that he remains attached to the thread of the story, using special transmitters and receivers.

Throughout the festival’s sessions, the organizers were keen to attract well-known radio voices that have a special place in the Moroccan listening memory, in order to carry out the audio description process and frame the “private” viewing sessions for the benefit of this segment.

The birth of the idea of ​​"audio description"
The cradle of this technology was the United States in the early seventies of the last century. And it is a coincidence that it was an idea proposed by a San Francisco University professor to her dean, who was only Auguste Coppola, brother of world director Francis Ford Coppola.

The dean was enthusiastic about the project and created an academic program to download it technically, so that in 1988 the first audio show will be presented, Coppola's movie "Tucker: The Man and His Dreams".

"It is an outlet for us and an activation of our right to culture and art," says Mustapha, who records that the Marrakesh Festival provides the only such date in Morocco, although this benefit remains seasonal.

"We have our sense and audio description help us fill in the blanks that may make it difficult to comprehend the content of the movie," added the 30's.

Mustafa hopes to generalize the scope of the experience through fixed dates throughout the Kingdom, so that a wide group of blind and visually impaired people can enjoy the creations of local and international cinematography.

Some of the blind people follow the cinema shows dedicated to them (Al-Jazeera)

Five different films
Five films in which a wide variety of themes and geographies were taken into consideration to satisfy different tastes. Moroccan comedy and four foreign horizons: "The River Runs Through" by Robert Redford (United States), the American star honored by the festival, and "Ki Dorsey" by his French director Bertrand Tavernier, which Marrakech also celebrated. Addition of "Leon" by Gareth Davis (Britain, Australia and the United States), and "Grand Central" (French) by Rebecca Zlotowski.

Human tales in his situations and the successes of his joy and his tragedy that are similar across the world, attracted to it a special audience that loosens the restrictions of the body and relaxes the hearing of the pulse of life on the screen, and honors its interior to capture the signs and messages hidden in every artwork.

The audio description paragraph falls within the humanitarian and social work that accompanies the festival since its first sessions. Besides this gesture towards an audience with special needs, the organizers continue to organize a medical campaign that includes performing eye operations for the benefit of patients from the outskirts of Marrakesh, in the presence of delegations of local, Arab and international artists. From the demonstration guests.