The film “Ziyara”, a documentary by director Simone Bitton on the sharing of beliefs and memory between Muslims and Jews in Morocco has been released on screens in France.
In Ziyara which means “pilgrimage”, the director Simone Bitton goes to meet the Muslim guardians of the Jewish memory of the country which emptied of its Hebrew population, in particular in the 50s, when many of the 250,000 Jews of Morocco won Israel.
” The subject of my film is not my own nostalgia, nor the nostalgia of the Jews, for Morocco, explains Simone Bitton at the microphone of Houda Ibrahim, from the Africa editorial team. It is the nostalgia of Muslims, their sense of loss. That’s what I went to look for. I wanted to know what their feeling was, to no longer have Jews in the countryside. It is their word that I went to collect.
The film is personal, but it is not intimate. I’m not looking for my own family, for example, for my own ancestors… It’s more a collective search and it’s the Muslims that interest me. I think that when you are a documentary filmmaker, even when you are looking for the past or telling the past, it is always the present that you are filming and therefore, what is in front of my camera, that is. is the Morocco of today. They are people of today. It is Morocco empty of its Jews but where Jewishness still looms “.
Zyara was released in theaters in France on Wednesday, December 1, and participates in the Cairo Film Festival which ends this Sunday, December 5.
► Also to listen : Simone Bitton was the guest of Orient Hebdo on November 26