Since August 15, the small port town of Douarnenez, in Brittany’s Finistère region, has been living to the rhythm of Moroccan cinema. For its 48th edition, which wraps up this Saturday, August 22, the town’s film festival chose to devote most of its program to what it deliberately calls, in the plural, « Les Marocs », or « The Moroccos », a title that immediately signals the ambition behind the selection.
Of the 176 films screened this week across the festival’s six sections, 77 belong to this central cycle. Far from settling for the landscapes, medinas, or uniform national identity often pushed by tourist imagery, the lineup sets out to show multiple territories, different languages, and memories that sometimes contradict one another. The festival rejects the idea of a single, unified Morocco and instead digs into the tensions, lingering colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity running through the country, spanning Arabic, Amazigh, and regional dialects.
Beyond the screening rooms, the event holds three major panel discussions each day, staged at Les Halles or under the town-center marquee, alongside three exhibitions on view throughout the week. The program is rounded out with evening concerts, a pop-up bookshop stocking more than 500 titles, and workshops covering sign language, the Breton language, and decolonial questions in film. This year’s poster was designed by Moroccan graphic artist El Kabira Hachimi, who hails from Errachidia and is based in Marrakech, built around a photograph by artist Inès Bouallou. An exhibition of her work on the mental health of queer people in Morocco is also on view at Les Halles for the festival’s full run.
Founded in 1978 by a group of film enthusiasts tied to the local youth and culture center, the Douarnenez Film Festival has built a distinctive identity over the decades: each year it invites audiences to discover, through film, a minoritized people or one fighting to defend its culture, language, or emancipation, in a spirit that echoes Brittany’s own history of resistance, notably the fight against the planned Plogoff nuclear plant in the 1970s. After last year’s focus on the peoples of Amazonia, it’s Morocco’s turn to receive this close attention.
This edition also fits into a broader framework. The festival is part of Season Mediterranean 2026, jointly led by France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture, and carried out by the Institut français. Running from May 15 to October 31 across numerous events in France, the season aims specifically to spotlight plural identities, diasporas, migration, and the circulation of stories between the Mediterranean’s two shores. In Douarnenez, that ambition takes the shape of a Morocco the festival refuses to pin down to a single definition, letting film surface its tensions, its legacies, and the richness of its languages, while giving the people living these realities the chance to reclaim the telling of their own story.
