CABO NEGRO
dir. Abdellah Taïa, 2024
France/Morocco. 74 min.
In French and Arabic with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, JUNE 5 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 13 – 5 PM followed by Q+A with Abdellah Taïa
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 28 – 5 PM

Ten years and several novels after SALVATION ARMY, Taïa stepped behind the camera again to create a slow-burning drama that similarly engages spectatorship and desire, this time vis-a-vis the tourism industry of the filmmaker’s home country of Morocco. Two queer friends seek refuge at a villa rented by an American academic named Jonathan. After he fails to arrive, the young Moroccans must figure out how to survive without returning home, and Taïa’s sophomore feature enters uneasy thriller territory (while continuing to display the unique combination of tenderness and asceticism that made SALVATION ARMY so startling.) Indeed, Taïa introduced a festival screening of the film by saying “Queer people in Morocco living (or trying to live) a ‘normal’ life is revolutionary, with their food, their cities, and their rituals.”

“The body in Taïa’s work is there to be bartered, but it also has a knack for finding affection even in the most pragmatic, or abusive, of transactions. A sequence in SALVATION ARMY of the child protagonist embracing his so-called abuser, desperate for emotional reciprocity, finds its correlative in CABO NEGRO when Jafaar caresses his client’s salt-and-pepper hair, post-coitus, not unlike one would rub a lamp in order to make a farfetched wish. The encounter is meant to simply guarantee the maintenance of Jaffar and Soundouss’s getaway, but Taïa captures the yearning of the sexual aftermath as an inevitable, and inevitably futile, queer wish for continuity, reciprocity, or recognition.” – Diego Semerene, Slant

“This film was inspired by two young gay Moroccans I follow on Instagram. They carry within them the powerful signs of a new, vibrant generation, who live each moment—at all costs—with crazy, inspiring intensity. Incendiary. From the stories they told me, I wrote the script for CABO NEGRO so I might capture that energy, that fire. That urgency. Soundouss and Jaâfar are heroes who no longer wait for change to come; instead, they live life to the fullest and create strong bonds of solidarity between themselves, outside the rules. The film will show these bonds and reveal the mechanisms of the social and political violence that is in process around them. Despite the end of innocence they experience in Cabo Negro, they will be able to rebel. Despite the extreme violence of the world, they will manage to live a love like a river that overflows.” – Abdellah Taia