Memory and Images
This research is part of a line of work that we began in 2024 with Peter Watkins, continued in 2025 with René Vautier, and which this year we dedicate to the Moroccan filmmaker Dalila Ennadre. It emerges from the desire to revisit and reactivate her work from within our present moment: a time marked by new forms of border violence, exclusionary discourses, forced displacement and increasingly normalized processes of dehumanization.
Faced with this context, Dalila’s cinema continues to feel profoundly necessary. Her films remind us of the importance of listening to those who remain outside official narratives and of recognizing the everyday dignity of lives so often rendered invisible.
The word "baraka" refers to a vital force that is difficult to translate: a mixture of grace, resistance, care and shared energy that runs through everyday life. It seemed to us a close way of naming what inhabits Dalila’s films: the ability to sustain life even within contexts marked by precarity, exile, colonial memory or exclusion.
Through works such as "El Batalett", "J’ai tant aimé" and "Jean Genet, Notre Père-des-Fleurs", Dalila created a deeply human cinema grounded in listening, proximity and trust. Her films restore voice and presence to women from the medina, marginalized people, bodies traversed by History and lives that rarely occupy the center of representation.
Her way of filming transforms the camera into a shared space. The people filmed do not appear as objects of representation, but as active participants in a process built through conversation, memory and shared experience.
The research is being developed in collaboration with Lilya Ennadre and seeks to open spaces for screenings, conversations and reflection around a body of work that continues to help us imagine other forms of community, listening and resistance.
