Night one. The festival opens in the courtyard of a restored caravanserai on the edge of the medina, where six hundred folding chairs have been arranged on raked earth facing a screen stretched between two palms. The Nuits de l'Atlas is in its first year, founded by a former distributor named Yasmina Berrada who spent two decades watching North African films premiere in Europe before audiences at home could see them. Her opening remarks last ninety seconds. The applause lasts longer.
Night two. The competition begins with a Tunisian family drama that runs three hours and loses perhaps a fifth of the audience to the food stalls by the second act. Those who stay are rewarded with a final twenty minutes of such unexpected tenderness that a man behind me, who had grumbled audibly through most of it, is crying openly by the end. On the walk back through the souk, arguments about the ending break out at every café.
Night three. A masterclass with the veteran Senegalese cinematographer Ousmane Diagne-Faye, who talks for two hours about light without once mentioning a camera. He describes filming at dawn in the Sahel, waiting for the precise moment when the sky turns the colour of weak tea, and scolds a young director in the audience for relying on drones. The young director takes notes throughout and thanks him afterwards. Diagne-Faye seems disappointed not to have provoked an argument.
The debut nobody expected
Night four. The film everyone will talk about for the rest of the week screens almost by accident, slotted in after a cancellation. 'Salt for the Road', the first feature by the Casablanca-born director Karim Bennani-Soulé, follows two brothers driving a borrowed lorry of oranges to Tangier. It is funny, angry and beautifully shot on a budget that would barely cover the catering on a European production. The courtyard gives it a standing ovation that lasts long enough to become awkward.
We are not asking Europe to discover us. We are asking our own cinemas to show us first. Everything else can come later.
Night five. Berrada explains her strategy over mint tea in the festival office, a former stable lined with film posters. Every film in competition must commit to a theatrical release in Morocco before it screens anywhere in Europe. Several sales agents refused and withdrew their films. She regards this as a success. The budget is modest, drawn from a local hotel group, a regional arts fund and a surprising number of private donors, many of them retired projectionists.
Night six. The jury, chaired by the Lebanese novelist and screenwriter Rania Haddad-Moreau, deliberates in a riad until four in the morning. Rumours leak via a waiter who claims to have heard shouting and at least one slammed door. The following evening Haddad-Moreau will insist, with a perfectly straight face, that the discussion was entirely cordial and that the door was merely caught by the wind. Nobody believes her, and she clearly prefers it that way.
Night seven. 'Salt for the Road' takes the top prize, and Bennani-Soulé, who has borrowed a jacket for the occasion, delivers a speech thanking his brothers, his mother and the orange growers of the Souss valley. Then the courtyard screens a restored Moroccan comedy from 1974, and six hundred people laugh at the same jokes their parents laughed at. Walking out past midnight, with snow still visible on the Atlas in the moonlight, it is hard not to feel that something has begun.
