Mediterranean Film Festival of Tetouan: Under the “Ouazzani Touch”

He speaks little. Hates approximation. Turns his back on incoherence… Abdelkrim Ouazzani is rigor. Not the kind that stifles, but the kind that builds. He embodies that Tetouan once said to be in the shadows, eclipsed for too long by the Casablancans—Belkahia, Chabaâ, Melehi, the solar clique. But the North is raising its head: Tetouan has given birth to giants. Above all, it saw the birth of Ouazzani. Student, teacher, then director of that school that became a myth, he turned painting into a scalpel. Fine, dry, precise, he cuts into reality to extract its essence. With him, no mannerisms, no effects. He does not seek to seduce. He seeks to speak. To shake up form. To restore breath where others have applied varnish. Ouazzani is not here to decorate the world; he works it raw.

In the medina of Tetouan, at the turn of Zaouia Qadiriya alley, a small inherited riad, no bigger than an artist’s dream; its master soberly named it: “The Workshop.” No frills, no varnish: just a den where the air vibrates with wild ideas, where friends gather to weave cultural conspiracies. There beats the heart of Abdelkrim Ouazzani, this dreamer and pioneer painter, who captures great existential questions with the simplicity of a charcoal line—simple, yet sly as a mirage.

Ouazzani is the kind of guy whose name already sounds like a blessing: generous to the bone, he opens his doors wide. In the 70s, when he inherited this bit of a house, he didn’t see a dusty inheritance but a living laboratory. Thunderous evenings unfold there, where imagination sparks like unlabeled champagne. Projects are born there, in cigarette smoke and bursts of laughter: the Tetouan Spring Salon, inaugurated in 1979 on the mythical Feddan square (now Méchouar square), an open space like an outstretched palm. And above all, the spark of the Tetouan Film Festival, which, in the early 80s, fed on these sleepless nights. Posters were handcrafted there, barefoot, with guts: a primal, organic art, as if Ouazzani were invoking street art before its time, or the sheikh of a zaouia struck by grace.

Artists flock, pens sharpen. Pens like that of Abdelwahab Meddeb; filmmakers like Ahmed Yachfine or Youssef Chahine, who arrives with his aura of an Egyptian giant…and festival stars: Abdelkrim Derkaoui, Farida Benlyazid, to name just a few. Around them, the clique of Tetouani cinephiles forms a profane chorus, obsessed with the screen like others with prayer. Ouazzani, he is the invisible master of ceremonies: he convenes, he provokes, he makes magic spring forth. Remember that edition where he hauls a monumental sculpture, a giant viper in resin and malice, which he deposits like a garden-of-Eden serpent in the city’s nooks. Even in a festival debate hall! A mischievous wink, an existential prank: “What if cinema bit for real?”

Approach

But Ouazzani is not just a dreamer. He is a maker, a tinkerer with a precise scalpel. He designs nomadic easels for the festival posters, supports… Tetouan then breathes art through every pore: the city becomes a live set, a permanent happening. Then come his own posters, these graphic bombs that explode with pagan joy. They don’t sell dreams; they inject them. Their secret? An ability to astonish, to make you smirk, to transform a simple promo. “It’s art that dances,” critics would say—and they’re right, because these posters invite happy dizziness, collective vertigo.

It must be said that it would be impossible to imagine the Mediterranean Film Festival, or even Tetouan, without this “Ouazzani touch”—this enchanting caress that infuses everything with rebellious vitality. He didn’t just decorate walls; he repainted the spirit of the times. Abdelkrim remains that essential saltimbanque: a reminder that art is not a luxury, but a breath, a thrust against oblivion. And what if we reopened the Workshop for one night? Just to see what he’s still cooking up.