This 35mm screening is part of the 'Returning the Colonial Gaze' season at the Barbican. You can find the full details of the season here.
Extract from a Tate season introduction to director Moumen Smihi's work:
In the mid-1950s, Tangier was still an International Zone. Smihi’s film presents the city at the eve of its independence, as Aïcha resorts to magical practices to try to prevent her husband from taking a second spouse. Around her, a society of women creates its own form of active resistance as the larger independence movement grows around it. Celebrated on its release in 1976 by Cahiers du Cinema, they declared El Chergui as 'the work we have all been waiting for, a work which is important for the way it makes popular action supreme by allowing it to be shown as it is, rather than in the way people choose to fossilize it.' Through a structure of montage and opposition, Smihi’s arresting images present a society torn by the contradictions of colonialism, religion, patriarchy, and resistance.
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