Workshops in Morocco

In 2008, at the request of the director of the ESAV, a private cinema school in Marrakech which had just been set up, Varan were asked to organise some training workshops for documentaries at the school. These workshops involved 30 first year students in film direction and editing and 20 second-year students taking specialist subjects : sound/editing/photography/direction. These were directed by 6 tutors from Varan as well as by Hamid Farzad, full professor at the school.

The first year workshop lasted for 6 weeks, with each student directing a film on a common subject: « the working day ». The second-year students worked for 7 weeks in teams of three (director, camera person, sound engineer) without a subject being specified.

The school, which aims to be a model for cinema training in Africa, combines a pedagogic project and a vitality which, together with the relative diversity of the public, the enthusiastic mind-set of the young participants, the director’s commitment and the school’s potential, combined to encourage Varan to meet the challenge presented by this workshop programme and to introduce its teaching methods into the curriculum of a film school and to train the students in the practice of documentary filmmaking, little developed in Morocco at the time. The results were extremely positive and the students’ work led to some often quite unusual proposals.

The experience was continued in 2009, with three groups of 12 students, all of them first-year students this time, who were supervised by 6 contributors. Thanks to this, 36 films were produced, some of the best of which circulated at festivals. Unfortunately, as this training course was very costly for the school, it was not possible to continue it over the following years.