With his feature debut, director Ismaël El Iraki presents a raucous, rock-and-roll-fueled tour through the underworld of Casablanca. Shot on 35mm and featuring a number of live performances, “Zanka Contact,” which premiered on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival, is a musical romp that mixes gangster film swagger with a marked sense of place.
“I’m a child of the 90s,” El Iraki tells Variety. “I was breastfed on Tarantino and Sergio Leone. Those films mixed with my Moroccan experience. Casablanca is a very violent city, and our project was to capture that spirit. It has a vulgar street poetry that can swing between laughter and violence from one sentence to the next. When I saw that in Tarantino movies, I said, hey, these are the guys from my neighborhood!”
The film, which the director describes as “a 70s subversive genre movie seen through a 90s lens,” follows a drug-addled...
“I’m a child of the 90s,” El Iraki tells Variety. “I was breastfed on Tarantino and Sergio Leone. Those films mixed with my Moroccan experience. Casablanca is a very violent city, and our project was to capture that spirit. It has a vulgar street poetry that can swing between laughter and violence from one sentence to the next. When I saw that in Tarantino movies, I said, hey, these are the guys from my neighborhood!”
The film, which the director describes as “a 70s subversive genre movie seen through a 90s lens,” follows a drug-addled...
- 9/9/2020
- by Ben Croll
- Variety Film + TV
The film-maker was at the Paris concert venue when attackers opened fire. His debut feature is inspired by his gruelling journey to recovery
‘For three days after the Bataclan, I thought I was dead,” says Ismaël el Iraki, whose debut feature, Zanka Contact, about two lost souls recovering from Ptsd, is playing at the Venice film festival. It’s a Wild at Heart-type love story starring Ahmed Hammoud and Moroccan music star Khansa Batma with debts to Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone. A car crash throws together a has-been rocker who has just returned to Casablanca and a streetwise con-artist, who get lulled into the shenanigans of the city’s music underworld.
Zanka Contact riffs on the director’s experiences trying to recover from all he witnessed at the Eagles of Death Metal concert at Paris’s Bataclan venue in November 2015, when gunmen massacred 90 people in a night of coordinated...
‘For three days after the Bataclan, I thought I was dead,” says Ismaël el Iraki, whose debut feature, Zanka Contact, about two lost souls recovering from Ptsd, is playing at the Venice film festival. It’s a Wild at Heart-type love story starring Ahmed Hammoud and Moroccan music star Khansa Batma with debts to Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone. A car crash throws together a has-been rocker who has just returned to Casablanca and a streetwise con-artist, who get lulled into the shenanigans of the city’s music underworld.
Zanka Contact riffs on the director’s experiences trying to recover from all he witnessed at the Eagles of Death Metal concert at Paris’s Bataclan venue in November 2015, when gunmen massacred 90 people in a night of coordinated...
- 9/7/2020
- by Kaleem Aftab
- The Guardian - Film News
Zanka Contact on display at the Venice Film Festival - Production / Funding - France/Belgium/Morocco
The feature debut from Ismaël El Iraki, produced by Barney Productions, Velvet Films and Mont Fleuri Production, will have its world premiere on the Lido, in the Orizzonti programme. A 2008 graduate from the directing department of La Fémis, and noticed with his short film H’rash (in national competition at Clermont-Ferrand in 2009), Ismaël El Iraki will benefit from great visibility for his feature length debut as his film Zanka Contact has been selected in the Orizzonti section of the 77th Venice Film Festival (2-12 September). Presented as a romantic rock road movie somewhere between the thriller and the musical, the film stars Khansa Batma, Ahmed Hammoud, Saïd Bey, Abderrahmane Oubihem, Mourad Zaoui and Fatima Attif. Written by Ismaël El Iraki, the script (which was one of the finalists for the Prix du Scénario) begins in a hellish Casablanca. A car-crash sets ablaze a burning, passionate love story between has-been...
This was a busy year at Tiff, where I was a juror for Fipresci, helping to award a prize for best premiere in the Discovery section. Not only did this mean that some other films had to take a back burner—sadly, I did not see Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge—but my writing time was a bit compromised as well. Better late than never? That is for you, Gentle Reader, to decide.Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany)So basic in the telling—a record of several days’ worth of visitors mostly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienberg, Germany—Austerlitz is a film that in many ways exemplifies the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. What is the net effect for humanity when, faced with the drive to remember the unfathomable, we employ the grossly inadequate tools at our disposal?Austerlitz takes its name from W. G. Sebald’s final novel.
- 9/20/2016
- MUBI
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