How to fall in love with film: Morocco's youth cinema screenings for young audiences

The Marrakech International Film Festival is not only about promoting and showing the works of aspiring and emerging directors.

For years the foundation behind the event has been carefully coordinating a campaign to introduce cinema to young audiences across the country in the hope of forging a life-long relationship with the film industry, whether that's as workers within or ticket-paying moviegoers.

Speak to any filmmaker and they'll all talk about the communion-like joy of watching a movie on the big screen and the pleasure of being able to share the experience afterwards. It's a feeling the Moroccan film industry wants to generate in order to help secure the survival of cinema.

Ali Hajji, general coordinator, of the Marrakech International Film Festival told Euronews Culture: "The festival’s selection committee organises a tour of schools and universities in Marrakech, Rabat and Casablanca. We also organise screenings for young audiences, showing films for children and teenagers, from four year olds all the way up to 18."

He added: "We work in partnership with schools and high schools, bringing in 700 students per screening. So there’s a lot of work done by our audience team to encourage audiences to return to the cinema."

Establishing a firm connection with fans is a crucial part of the process that film festivals help to celebrate and cement. It's an exchange that's also enriching for filmmakers, who get to experience at first hand audience reaction.

Director Walter Salles' latest work I'm Still Here was showing in Marrakech. His film is also Brazil's entry for the Oscars.

"Cinema has to be polyphonic in nature," Salles shared with Euronews Culture. "It’s about unveiling your part of the world that you’re unaware of. And so the more voices there are, the more cinema is actually doing what it should, which is to be an instrument of unveiling and revealing the world. So I’m, I’m really fond of discoveries in cinema."

Sentiments echoed by five-time Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón: "It’s in the process of audiences watching films where the real creative process begins. Filmmakers, we only deliver so far, because in reality every film is great in the head and hearts of the viewer."

For more on what Morocco is doing to promote cinema, watch the film in the player above.

Video editor • Joseph Allen