Return to Oujda

This cinematic pilgrimage back to the Moroccan city of Oujda reconnects with a tradition that conceived of Morocco and Algeria as one country and of Jews and Muslims as two deeply interconnected communities, living together in friendship and symbiosis. For centuries before colonization, Oujda was a cultural crossroads, home to a thriving Judeo-Arabic civilization. French rule created strong economic and cultural ties between Arab Jews and Europeans and, following Moroccan independence in 1956, many Jews migrated to France. For the filmmaker, who left Oujda as a young woman, the journey has a profound personal significance: The city has been coming to her at night, again and again, in dreams. To see her parents’ house, the city streets and the surrounding countryside has become an obsession. Friendship ties that have existed for generations are renewed spontaneously, between Jews who left and Jews who stayed and between Jews and Muslims, whose families had been neighbors for generations. The camera captures these reunions tenderly, against a beautiful Mediterranean backdrop.