L'Armée du Salut

Credits

Name: L'Armée du Salut

Country: Marokko; Frankreich

Year of publication: 2013

Format: DCP

Color: color

Language : OF m. engl. UT

Duration: 81 Minuten

Direction: Taïa, Abdellah

Camera: Godard, Agnès

Editing: Tourmen, Françoise

Sound: Martin, Fanny

Actor: Mrini, Said; Ait M`Hand, Karim; Ennaji, Amine; Landenberg, Frédéric; Slaoui, Hamza

Guest: Taïa, Abdellah

Abstract

The film follows two phases in the life of a Moroccan man named Abdellah. The first shows him as a teenager in Casablanca, living with his conservative family in which the subject of sexuality is full of taboos. He has a dysfunctional relationship with his father, and cannot speak about his homosexual feelings with his parents. This leaves him only able to engage in passing fancies with other men on the street or the beach. In the second phase, ten years later, Abdellah has a Swiss lover, and he leaves Morocco to study in Geneva. There, he decides to break ties with his previous life in the shadows.

AbdellahTaïa is the first Arabic-language writer who has openly come out with his homosexuality. His film is based upon his semi-autobiographical eponymous novel from 2006. But he “had to forget the book”, he says, in order to make the film. “The hero (who also bears my name: Abdellah) had to emerge from a certain reality to find another. The only thing I had to be faithful to was my vision of Morocco, of a Moroccan self that is impossible to construct freely.”

  Trailer