(MENAFN- Morocco World News) In an interview with the Israeli channel i24 French-Moroccan director Kamal Ashkar said his new film called 'Return of the Native: Jerusalem-Tinghir' will document Moroccan Jews in Israel returning to their ancestral homeland in North Africa and aim to invite other Moroccans living in the Jewish state to follow suit.
The director's second film is set to be released later this year. 'We the Muslims of Morocco have lost a part of ourselves and the Moroccan Jews who emigrated to Israel have lost a part of themselves' Ashkar said. 'My job is to fix it.' In 2013 Ashkar released the film 'Echoes of the Mellah: Tinghir-Jerusalem' which detailed the peaceful coexistence between ethnically Amazigh or Berber Muslims and Jews in the town of Tinghir during the time of the French protectorate.
Interview avec Kamal Hachkar: une passion judeo… par i24news-fr
Ashkar won several awards in Morocco and abroad but some politicians most notably of the Justice and Development Party criticized the film saying it encourages the normalization of relations with Israel – a country Morocco has not had an official political relationship with since the Second Intifada in 2000. The economic relationship between the two countries however has prospered: Israel was Morocco's third-largest trading partner in 2015. Before the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad began encouraging North African Jews to emigrate to the newly-established Jewish state in the 1950's a community of 200000 Jews lived in Morocco according to report by Al-Jazeera last year. A Jewish-Moroccan political activist who returned to his home country after a brief stay in Israel told Al-Jazeera that the 'intense Zionist propaganda' at the time made the Jewish community in Morocco feel 'threatened.' The same report quoted a villager from the Moroccan town of Agouim as saying: 'I helped carry luggage when the Jews boarded the buses. When they left their amazing Jewish food went with them. We no longer danced traditional ahwach. We didn't want them to leave.'
Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.