"Ziyara": Simone Bitton meets the Muslim guardians of Jewish memory in Morocco
Simone Bitton.
© Éric Bataillon / RFI
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
The film "Ziyara", a documentary by director Simone Bitton on the sharing of beliefs and memory between Muslims and Jews in Morocco has been released on screens in France.
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In
Ziyara
which means "pilgrimage", the director Simone Bitton goes to meet the Muslim guardians of the Jewish memory of the country which emptied of its Hebrew population, in particular in the 1950s, when many of Morocco's 250,000 Jews won Israel.
"
The subject of my film is not my own nostalgia, nor the nostalgia of the Jews, for Morocco,"
explains Simone Bitton at the microphone of
Houda Ibrahim
, of the Africa editorial staff.
It is the nostalgia of Muslims, their sense of loss.
That's what I went to look for.
I wanted to know what their feeling was, of no longer having Jews in the countryside.
It is their word that I went to collect.
The film is personal, but it is not intimate. I'm not looking for my own family, for example, for my own ancestors… It's more a collective search and it's the Muslims that interest me. I think that when you are a documentary filmmaker, even when you are looking for the past or telling the past, it is always the present that you are filming and therefore, what is in front of my camera, that is. is the Morocco of today. They are people of today. It is Morocco empty of its Jews but where Judaism still hovers
”.
Zyara
was released in theaters in France on Wednesday, December 1, and participates in the Cairo Film Festival which ends this Sunday, December 5.
►
Also to listen
: Simone Bitton was the guest of Orient Hebdo on November 26
ZIYARA - Trailer from JHR Films on Vimeo.
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