Korean Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho fondly recalled his film student days as took up the baton of Jury President at the 22nd Marrakech Film Festival on Friday.
He was joined on stage at the opening night ceremony by jury members Celine Song, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, Karim Aïnouz, Hakim Belabbes, Julia Ducournau, and Payman Maadi.
Over the course of the next eight days, they will judge 14 first and second features in the running for the festival’s Golden Star Award.
Joon Ho cast his mind back to his own filmmaker beginnings at the opening ceremony.
“22 years. What were you doing when you were 22-years-old? Or what are you planning to do when you turn 22?,” he said.
“At 22, I was greedily devouring movies as a student of cinema. I watched three, four films a day. I wanted to make them myself. Why did they put the camera there? Why is the actor facing that direction? Why did they cut away from that scene at that moment?”
“Those were the questions that consumed me at 22. Looking back, my 22-year-old self was brimming with energy and passion for cinema. I feel that Marrakech is also buzzing with a special energy as it enters its 22nd year.”
He noted the festival’s strong Korean connections.
Korea has won the main competition twice, with Park Jung-bum’s The Journals of Musan clinching the Golden Star in 2010, followed by Lee Su-jin’s Han Gong-ju in 2013, which received the prize from a jury presided over by Martin Scorsese.
Joon Ho is the festival’s first Asian jury president.
Speaking on the red carpet, festival director Mélita Toscan du Plantier said she had been courting the director for the jury president role for years.
“He is always busy, but he said if you ask one year ahead, I will commit. I was like ‘really’, and he is here. That’s very rare. People often, say they’ll come, and then they’re busy.”
Toscan du Plantier suggested her longtime friend Martin Scorsese, regular guest and past Joon Ho collaborator Tilda Swinton (Okja and Snowpiercer), and Korean Marrakech winner y Lee Su-jin had also pressed upon him to attend.
Friday’s opening ceremony also saw veteran Egyptian actor Hussein Fahmi feted with a career achievement award.
Egyptian star Yousra read out a tribute to the actor celebrating the diversity of his roles and support for cinema across his 50-year career.
The Marrakech Film Festival runs from November 28 to December 6.
The jury president arrived in Morocco with a rough cut of his latest film, which, as luck would have it, starred another juror. With the day’s screenings and deliberations behind them — and months before the finished version would make its world premiere — Luca Guadagnino welcomed Andrew Garfield to a discreet hotel showing of “After the Hunt.”
This year’s edition brings that clubby informality squarely into the spotlight. The festival’s longtime president Melita Toscan du Plantier (who is also a producer) has once again assembled a powerhouse jury, presided over by Bong Joon-ho, the Oscar-winning director of “Parasite,” with Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, Celine Song, Julia Ducournau, Karim Aïnouz, Hakim Belabbes and Payman Maadi. Over the course of one week, starting this weekend, they’ll be discovering 13 films by emerging directors playing in competition.
“We’ve tried to position the festival as a bridge between leading figures of world cinema and emerging talents,” says artistic director Remi Bonhomme. “Marrakech is a gateway between Europe and Africa, which allows us to operate both internationally and regionally. At the same time, being at the end of the year places us right in the middle of the Oscar race. We want to embrace that strategic position both geographically and in terms of the calendar.”
This year’s program features many International Feature Oscar contenders – among them “Palestine 36,” “Calle Malaga,” “The President’s Cake,” “A Poet” and “No Other Choice” – alongside gala screenings of “Frankenstein” and “Hamnet,” and conversations with Jafar Panahi, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Jodie Foster, and AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer, making its awards-season footprint unmistakable.
For Bonhomme, however, this new focus simply foregrounds what was already there.
The festival will close with Palestine’s International Oscar submission “Palestine 36”
“Guests want to be here,” he explains. “They value the chance to meet each other in a relaxed setting. Unlike Cannes or Venice, where everyone bumps into each other without real time to connect, Marrakech allows for genuine exchanges. And as the Academy has opened significantly to diversity, many Arab and African filmmakers and producers we invite are now Academy members as well.”
But Marrakech is more than a picturesque version of an FYC screening, swapping the Hollywood Hills for the Atlas Mountains. Bonhomme also wants to leverage that intimacy to integrate emerging filmmakers into the global circuit.
“I wanted the festival to be a place where international figures genuinely engage with the region,” he says. “Because these conversations have never been more important.”
He points to Andrew Garfield, who continued promoting last year’s top winner, Scandar Copti’s “Happy Holidays,” long after the festival wrapped. He highlights 2022 juror Vanessa Kirby, who was so moved by best-director winner “Thunder,” helmed by Carmen Jaquier, that she signed on as an executive producer, helped guide the film to Switzerland’s official Oscar submission, and remained involved on the filmmaker’s next feature.
And he speaks with particular pride of 2023 jury president Jessica Chastain.
“After the closing ceremony, Chastain and her producing partner met with all the filmmakers in competition and committed to following their projects,” Bonhomme says. “She even told me she thought the lineup was stronger than the competition she judged at Cannes — which, I admit, I was very happy to hear.”
Bonhomme sees the trend continuing with incoming jury president Bong Joon-ho, who awarded the Golden Lion at Venice to “Happening” and then cast its lead, Anamaria Vartolomei, in his very next project.
Guillermo del Toro will receive a tribute before a gala screening “Frankenstein.” He is one of several awards contenders participating in Marrakech’s conversations series as well.
Four of the competing titles this year were developed through the festival’s Atlas Workshops incubator, though Bonhomme stresses that participation in the program does not guarantee selection. But he does take particular satisfaction in following projects from their earliest stages to premiere, and then further still.
Drawing on that holistic view — and his previous stint running Cannes’ Critics’ Week sidebar — Bonhomme has strategically positioned Marrakech in the wider festival circuit. To wit: the fact that Copti’s “Happy Holidays” and Asmae El Moudir’s “The Mother of All Lies” both claimed Marrakech’s top prize after earlier recognition from Venice’s Horizons and Cannes’ Un Certain Regard is no coincidence.
“Aisha Can’t Fly Away” won the top post-production prize at last year’s Atlas Workshops before premiering in Un Certain Regard. Next it screens in competition in Marrakech.
Marrakech Film Festival
“The market is tough for first and second films,” he explains. “Even if you play in a sidebar at San Sebastián, Locarno, or Venice, it’s hard to get the exposure a first film needs. Sales agents increasingly target two or three key festivals to launch a film, rather than relying on just one. We’ve been shaping Marrakech to be one of those essential stops, positioning films for complementary exposure.”
The Atlas ecosystem — now encompassing development, marketing, distribution, and press initiatives under the Atlas Programs banner — has been central to that strategy. This year, the festival introduces the Atlas Distribution Meetings, bringing together 60 distribution professionals from the Arab world, Africa, and Europe.
While not a traditional market, this influx of buyers has had a knock-on effect on programming, helping Marrakech secure world premieres like Marwan Hamed’s “El Set,” Meryem Benm’Barek’s “Behind the Palm Trees,” and the international debut of the Australian feature “First Light.”
Looking ahead, Bonhomme aims to expand the industry side further, inviting megawatt stars, sales and distribution vets, awards hopefuls and emerging auteurs to connect at the same picturesque setting — and in doing so, creating “another tool within the festival ecosystem that can have a real international impact.”
“We’re at a moment when it’s important for international and regional films to be discovered not just in Europe but on the African continent,” he says. “Arab and African filmmakers still rely heavily on European financing and festivals, yet their home audiences are growing. Marrakech can give these films a platform to launch internationally while remaining rooted in their region. That’s my goal going forward.”
“First Light” will make its international premiere at Marrakech
The award-winning filmmaker was slated to serve as artistic godfather for Marrakech’s industry arm, which spotlights development titles and works-in-progress from dynamic new talents from across the MENA world. Lending his name to this year’s class, Scorsese planned to mentor the selected filmmakers, offering one-on-one artistic and strategic advice for each and every project.
Unable to travel due to personal reasons, and preferring to engage with workshop participants in a more direct way, the filmmaker will take a rain check, promising to return, in person, for a subsequent edition. News broke from sources close to the Atlas team, while neither festival nor filmmaker are expected to make a formal statement.
Despite this recent turn, event organizers promise no further changes to a program that has quickly become a leading incubator for eye-turning fare.
Projects spotlighted at previous editions include Amjad Al Rasheed’s “Inshallah A Boy,” which premiered in Cannes’ Critics Week and will serve as Jordan’s Oscar selection, Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias,” which played Venice and Toronto, and will represent Palestine in the Oscar race, and Asmae El Moudir’s “The Mother of All Lies,” which claimed the best director prize out of this year’s Un Certain Regard in Cannes, and will serve as Morocco’s International Film entry.
“The idea is to have a proper platform that would allow these projects to have the time to developed and to meet international partners,” says Atlas Workshops director Hedi Zardi. “Over the course of four days we offer personal consultation panels, training and mentorships sessions and a coproduction market, all to help our selected filmmakers to share ideas, to develop their projects and to meet new and potential partners, launching the titles on the international market.”
Marrakech’s Atlas Workshop program will run from Nov. 27-30, while the wider festival goes until Dec. 3.
