Kathy Wazana, cinéaste, Toronto
Pour une Nouvelle Séville est l’histoire d’un exode contemporain et de l’impact qu’il a eu sur ceux qui sont partis, ceux qui sont restés et la terre ancestrale qu’ils ont abandonnée. Ce long-métrage documentaire est en même temps enquête historique et film d'essai portant sur l'identité de Juif-Arabe, cette double identité qui dérange tant la notion, fort problématique, de l'ennemi.
For a New Seville is the story of men and women whose identity as Arab Jews challenges the very notion of enemy. Shot in Morocco and in Israel-Palestine, it is part historical investigation, part poetic and musical essay on loss and longing, on hope and the possibilities of coexistence.
This feature documentary is an investigation into the circumstances that led to the exodus of Jews from Morocco. Were Jews expelled from Morocco, as some have claimed? What role did Israel’s need to « judaïse the land » play in the campaign to transfer Jews out of the Arab world? Why did the Moroccan authorities facilitate the departure of Jewish citizens at the same time that the King pleaded with them not to leave? As we meet actors and witnesses to the evacuation campaign led by Israel and the Jewish Agency, and to efforts by entire villages to prevent their Jewish neighbours from leaving, the commonly held belief that Jews were expelled or forced to leave Morocco takes on a new meaning. Along the way, other myths are shattered. What emerges is evidence of a suppressed history: that of the Arab Jews and their relationship to both Israel and their Arab homelands.
Our investigation helps to reframe the exiles and exoduses that followed the creation of the State of Israel in the context of the 2500-year history of Jewish-Arab coexistence, a history suppressed because it doesn’t fit the Zionist ideology that dictates the creation of an exclusively Jewish State. This history will be uncovered through the personal experiences of Sami, Shira, Maurice, Jojo and David. Israelis born in Morocco or of Moroccan parents, they long to return to their ancestral homeland. Some of them will make the journey; the others hesitate, preferring to keep theirmemories intact, or are afraid, as David says, that they will want to stay there.
We meet Sami, Shira and “The Three Fisherman” for the first time at a cultural event in Tel Aviv, that brings together a generation of Israelis seeking to reclaim and assert their Moroccan identity. Although none of them have experienced it directly, they are informed by the ancient memory of another history and another culture than the Ashkenazi narrative that has dominated the Israeli political discourse until now. They see themselves as a bridge between Israel and its Arab neighbours; for them dialogue with Palestinians is a natural extension of the long tradition of Jewish-Arab-Muslim solidarity in Moorish Spain and North Africa. With Shira we journey back to Morocco, where the tradition of Jewish-Arab-Muslim coexistence has not been lost, and where she comes face to face with the possibility of a “New Seville”. Shira’s emotional journey and Sami’s lucid, hard-hitting poetry expose the double dispossession suffered by Jews who were torn from their ancestral homelands to help build a Jewish State, a "homeland for the dispossessed" that ultimately rejects them unless they are willing to strip away their Arabness.
Dramatic visuals, live musical recordings, provocative poetry and charismatic characters will tell a compelling story of what was, and propose a vision of what could be.