by Helen Barlow
I first met Christoph Terhechte when he was editor of the Berlin entertainment bible TIP magazine, when I was living in Berlin in the early 1990s. In 1997 he moved over to programming for the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section and ended up running it for 17 years. For two years he has been the artistic director of the Marrakech International Film Festival.
“I was really looking for a change in my professional life,” he explains. “The other reason I was keen to come to Marrakech was that in 1999 I had put together a programme for the Forum about filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani, who was one of the central figures in the development of artistic filmmaking in Morocco in the 1970s. In 2017, I co-curated a retrospective on the almost forgotten Moroccan director and I fell in love with Morocco and its film culture. He’d been working on a book about the history of Moroccan cinema, which will come out in a few weeks. He died years ago, but this book was left unpublished. Moroccan cinema is a young cinema culture and it was only in the late ‘60s that an artistic cinema started developing.”
How has the festival changed since Terhechte took over?
“What I and the team felt was lacking was better access for the public. The festival has always been free, so it was accessible in theory, but little had been done to actually attract the public and do outreach. So that’s what we changed. We created Q&As after the films and presentations beforehand and really opened the festival to the locals and also to local cinema. We created the Moroccan Panorama and we are showing more Arab and African films than before. It made more sense for the festival to be anchored in the region. We created the Atlas Workshops to attract an international community of filmmakers and film producers and to expose them to Moroccan and African cinema. The idea was to become a hub for the regional film industry, and I think this is working quite well in its second year. Now Marrakech is the festival you cannot miss if you are interested in films from the region.”
TRIBUTE TO AUSTRALIAN CINEMA
“The idea to have a tribute to Australian cinema had been born before I joined the festival. Last year we thought we could do it but in fact we only had five months to prepare the festival and couldn’t prepare a retrospective like that in such a short time. So, we planned it for this year.
“Last year I compiled a list of Australian films that I’d seen or hadn’t seen, and they had always appeared to me as individual films or masterpieces and some oddities, but I’d never seen them in one context. So, just realising that Australian cinema is more than just the sum of the individual films and there is a real identity, was something that struck us this year both in the programming department and the catalogue editor who saw all the films and wrote text about them.
“We saw several similarities.
“First of all, the main character in almost all Australian films is the landscape. You can’t think of these films without thinking of the desert or the bush, the wild and still unexplored landscape.
“A second subject of many of the films is the conflict between the aboriginal population of Australia and the white people who came and often wreaked havoc, which meant disaster for nature and the natives. That subject is there throughout the Australian film industry, especially since aboriginal filmmakers have started to tell stories for themselves by themselves.
“The third subject is one that was there from the very beginning of Australian feature films. The first feature film ever made in the history of cinema is Australian film The Story of the Kelly Gang and it’s interesting because it laid the foundation for a long line of films about outlaws and outcasts and that includes the film that screened after the tribute to Australian cinema, Mad Max. This year there’s another film, The True History of the Kelly Gang by Justin Kurzel who is one of the most talented filmmakers in the current generation. So, seeing these films together in a totally new light in a way justified that we put this program together because it helps you understand that Australian cinema is not just cinema from one country far away but has a real identity.”
Has he ever been to Australia?
“I’ve never been, I dreamt of going to Australia when I was a little boy. One night when my parents went out, they met an Australian couple, who gave them an Australian dollar with a platypus on the back and said that should be the first coin I spend when I go to Australia. Until today I keep that coin and I still haven’t been.”
