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Biographical note
The filmmaker and writer Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011) was born in Casablanca. When Bouanani was sixteen, during the final days of the colonial era, his father, a police officer, was assassinated—a tragedy that the artist returned to in his work for the rest of his life. Bouanani studied film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris for three years before returning to Morocco and going on to direct several classics of North African cinema. Most of his movies had their genesis in poems, and he published three collections during his lifetime, as well as the novel The Hospital, also appearing in English for the first time with New Directions. Never keen to publish, Bouanani left behind a trove of additional manuscripts. Emma Ramadan is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Ahmed Bouanani’s Shutters for New Directions.""An atmosphere of mystery surrounds his work: Bouanani offers a precious contribution to Morocco's collective memory.""
- Le Monde,
"A melancholy, hallucinatory, biting meditation."
- New York Review of Books,
"Bouanani’s work mocks authoritarianism and fanaticism, despairs of Morocco’s democratic failure, and struggles to hold on to the cultural and historical inheritance its government is bent on erasing... A scathing, fearsome, and hallucinatory collection."
- Publishers Weekly,
""After the collective trauma of the colonial occupation of Morocco, a vanguard of artists forged cultural practices that sought to establish a new vision of the country, appealing to its ancient traditions passed down through oral culture. Filmmaker, poet, and writer Ahmed Bouanani was a towering presence in this landscape, pioneering a cinematic and poetic language that influenced a generation to come.""
- Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art,