Simone Bitton gives Edmond Amran Elmaleh his letters of nobility [Interview]

Between Simone Bitton, Leïla Shahid, Mohamed Berrada, Dominique Eddé, Abdellah Baïda, Reda Benjelloun, Hassan Bourkia, Mohamed Tozy, Khalil El Ghrib, Anis Balafrej and many others, the Moroccan writer and intellectual Edmond Amran Elmaleh has established friendships strong and sincere, which will have lasted for decades. Also known for his involvement in the former Moroccan Communist Party (PCM), the author spent the end of his life in an apartment in Rabat, always well surrounded. Of Jewish faith, he stood against the departure of his fellow citizens to Israel, defending tooth and nail that their country is and will remain Morocco. During the 1970s, his political commitment pushed him into exile in France, where he continued his prolix writing.

It is with the look of the documentarian, intimate in dignity, that Simone Bitton rehabilitates the figure of the man and the intellectual who was Edmond Amran Elmaleh, who died in 2010. Supported by 2M and by the Council of the Moroccan community abroad (CCME), “The Thousand and One Days of Hajj Edmond” was screened at the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM 2024). On this occasion, the director recalled how the deceased would have been “scandalized” by the current situation in Palestine, particularly in the context of the war in the Gaza Strip.

When your previous documentary (Ziyara) was released, you told Yabiladi that you were preparing a film on Edmond Amran Elmaleh and you even explained why. How have you been since then?

I have more ideas! Moreover, one of Ziyara's last shots was the grave of Edmond Amran Elmaleh, with the ethnologist Aomar Boum meditating, with a quote from Elmaleh at the end. So I already had the idea in mind, with this transition to the next film, which I actually made. It took me almost three years of work, especially given the number of speakers, who are 17 on screen and each of whom lives in a country or city.

Edmond Amran Elmaleh/Ph. Saad A. Tazi

But this number of speakers tells us that the late Edmond had a lot of knowledge. He was very sociable, easily creating strong and sincere friendships everywhere. They were always much younger than him, so even though he didn't have children, he was always surrounded by young people. For my documentary, this was fortunate because although he left more than ten years ago, many of his friends are still in this world.

To tell the truth, I was spoiled for choice and everyone wanted to participate in the documentary, because everyone loved Edmond and had things to tell. My regret is having filmed a lot of them without being able to integrate them into a single film. In addition to the testimonies, there are archives and such a complex life to tell, so a lot of editing work, arbitrations to be made and decisions to be made, like weaving lace.

There were also the disadvantages to which we are accustomed in documentary production, that is to say the lack of financing, which, even when promised, arrives too late. Sometimes you have to stop mid-process due to a lack of resources that you have to look for. But I'm used to it.

Simone Bitton au FIFM 2024 / Ph. FIFM

Given such a wide circle, we can say that Edmond's friends are his children, in a way. Given the exhaustive testimonies that can still be collected concerning him, do you think that it deserves a second part?

Maybe not, but he certainly deserves other films and other books to be dedicated to him. There are already a few, but not yet enough since he is a great figure in Moroccan culture and political heritage. Beyond the tributes, I think it now deserves to be studied more, especially at university. It would be good if his works were included in literature lessons. For my part, it seems to me that I have done my job as a documentary filmmaker. Now let 100 roses bloom from it.

You talked about lace and this film is hand-stitched. However, you describe it as a simple film, made up of interviews, archives, book documentation, travel… However, we are witnessing an evolution of practices, which are increasingly inspired by cinematographic uses. What do you think of this decompartmentalization in relation to the artisanal nature of documentary work?

There is now a school of young documentaries, which uses animation, puppets, a certain form of storytelling… I really like it and I think it's successful, in certain films. I stuck to the simplicity of raw, raw materials, like painters who only use primary colors. This is why I present my documentary as being made of simple ingredients: The interview, the voice-over, the place where things happened, the real and unaltered archive.

This does not mean that the subject and the editing are not complex, but it is very important to me that the work and its raw material are very authentic. I want to film the house where my character was actually born and I'm looking until I find it. If I can't find it, it's not there. I am very attached to this integrity of reality and the authenticity of the place, of the word, of the anecdote. For me, this is simplicity, which is difficult to achieve in all the arts.

Ph. FIFM

In your last two documentaries, you film living cemeteries and you film life after death. Was it important to you, after so many years of “filming the war”, as you say at the end of this film when speaking to Edmond Amran Elmaleh?

In this latest documentary, I apologize to Edmond Amran Elmaleh for not having been often at his side during the last years of his life, because it was a period when I was very busy making films difficult in the Middle East, in Palestine. It took all my time and a lot of energy. I stopped by Rabat from time to time to quickly greet him and he always came to my screenings in Morocco. The last time I saw him was a few months before he died.

I was not there during the last few weeks, while some made the effort to come, sometimes from afar. I carried around this guilt, because the late Edmond gave everyone the impression of being his only son. This filial feeling makes you feel very guilty when you are not there. He was very smart!

During the last ten years of his life, he made a new family of new young people who were very attached to him, painters, visual artists, Moroccan novelists. He never ate lunch alone and died surrounded by respect and affection.

You say that outside of Morocco, Edmond Amran Elmaleh has not yet had the right to the celebrity of the intellectual that he is, particularly in France, where he lived for years…

Yes. He is much better known in Morocco than in France. For example, I requested the rights to an extract from an article used in my documentary, which the late Edmond had written for Les Temps Modernes, a French magazine published by Gallimard. After two weeks, the publisher replied to me that he had “no trace of a contract”. He didn't even know who it was. Indeed, the deceased was not properly recognized there.

Simone Bitton au FIFM 2024 / Ph. FIFM

It must be said that he did everything for this recognition, but his language remained perceived as difficult. The late Edmond took a lot of liberties with punctuation and we couldn't say anything to him. He peppered his French with words in Darija and understood whoever wanted. Some had difficulty entering this literary universe, but the Moroccan public, French-speaking in any case, was much more receptive.

You describe the departure of Jews from Morocco as a “historical waste”. It’s an idea that resonates with the thinking of Edmond Amaran Elmaleh. How have his writings influenced your personal journey?

In this film, where I speak in the first person because it is very intimate, I say that I discovered him through his first book. As a student in Paris, I went to the Maspero bookstore, where I found this book: “Parcours immobile” [paru en 1980, ndlr]with a design that closely resembles tar on Amazigh pottery. The illustration, the Jewish name very common in Morocco, caught my eye and I bought the book. Then I dove into it.

I remember well that this reading was not the easiest, but I immediately felt at home in his words, including those in Darija. Shortly after, I had the opportunity to meet him personally, since he lived in Paris. It's Leila Shahid [ancienne ambassadrice de la Palestine auprès de l’Union européenne, de la Belgique et du Luxembourg de 2005 à 2015, ndlr] who brought me to his house the first time, to introduce him to me. For my part, I was already an activist, very young. I wrote columns in the Revue d’études Palestinianes. Leila told me that he would be delighted to meet me, since “there are so few Jews who show solidarity with the Palestinians.”

Since then, we have never really left each other, being all Moroccans, attached to the Palestinian cause, while having very strong Jewish ties, which not only do we not deny, but which we embrace. We say the real Jews are us and not those who supposedly kill in our name. We are the people of the book, of wisdom, of writing, of justice, not of war and the arms trade.

Simon Levy, Abraham Serfaty, Edmond Amaran Elmaleh, died around the same time. You have dedicated films to Serfaty, to Mahmoud Darwich, to Mehdi Ben Barka… If journalists are historians of the present, can we say that documentary filmmakers are the historians who connect our past to the present?

Simon Levy, Abraham Serfaty, Edmond Amaran Elmaleh, I knew all three of them. I think that documentarians will be the best allies of historians and that the historians of tomorrow will watch our films with great attention. I think that it is in our films, very often, that they will find the truth which will no longer appear in the archives of politicians' tongue-in-cheek.

When the documentary filmmaker has integrity, they will find the integrity they are looking for and that is to write the world as it is. It is an archive in itself. Moreover, several of my films are used by History teachers, who show them in class. We are hand in hand, we work more on feeling, on emotion, but when the documentarian is sincere, he acts as a historian, absolutely.