A fire blazes through the forest and lights up the night sky around El Mansouria, the homestead near Tangier of the wealthy Bechtani clan. It’s not initially clear who set it, but the family suspects that it is the work of Bab Al Sama, an unscrupulous real estate developer intent on turning the land into a profitable construction zone, despite the ecological consequences. Birdland, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, is the second feature-length fiction film of Moroccan director Leila Kilani, who more than a decade ago made Sur la planche (2011), about women in Tangier factories trying to supplement their meagre incomes, and has made a number of documentaries about poverty, state violence and dissidence. Her latest film is an intricately woven vision of collapse and regeneration that blends the politically trenchant with the poetic and mystical. The spite and intrigue of family dynasty melodrama is a suspenseful hook, and is elevated by a wider cosmic perspective of esoteric connections, significances and signs, and the unstoppable forces of social revolution.
We see this enchanting and cursed world through the spectacled eyes (and the live-streamed footage she shoots on her phone, when it takes over the frame) of the youngest Bechtani, Lina (Ifham Mathet). She is rebellious like her father Anis (Mustafa Shimdat). He has blocked the family’s attempt to sell the estate, resorting to North African “habous” law, according to which he can stipulate his share must be put to good social use through a charitable foundation. He does not want to see the land taken from the slum-dwellers down the hill, or from the birds, who share just as much right to remain there as anyone. The impoverished locals have lived there for forty years, but do not possess ownership papers — and the targeting of their very existence for erasure by corporate greed may be the final straw before they rise up.
As for the feathered creatures that nest in the trees, he has spent a lot of time observing them as an ornithologist, a passion and connection to nature he has passed on to Lina. Lina is mute (her father likes to say that she speaks the language of birds), though we have access to her inner world through her voice-over, which guides us through these dense layers of mystery and meaning. She writes questions on her body when desperate to communicate, but her silence seems chiefly a renunciation of all that is rotten within the dynasty. Her main voice, and protector, is the maid Chinwiya (Ikram Layachi) who brought her back from grief after her mother died, and who has the mettle to take on Lila’s grandmother, a scheming matriarch with her own ideas about how the clan should safeguard an unpredictable future. As a wedding draws near, and the conflagration burns on around, family tensions reach breaking point.
Lina has taken the name of the black stork (“Cicogna Nera”), a bird often spotted on her trips into the forest, as her online user-name. A believer in both forces beyond reason and technology, she is a sensitive observer able to synthesise tradition and innovation to forge a new path. As disputes around the family inheritance and the fate of El Mansouria escalate into intimidation and violence, she shifts her focus from innocuous posts about wildlife and the power of coincidence, recording instead the developing situation as it happens for a quickly expanding live-stream audience. She positions herself, in this way, as a witness and a conduit of the truth — part of a new wave of citizen journalists, who were a key force in the Arab Spring and its grassroots resistance movements in Morocco and elsewhere in the Arab world.
The film succeeds in setting up a complex universe of heritage, dispossession, beautifully lensed natural wonder and social transformation, only to lose some of its momentum in the second half. But it remains a fierce warning and promise, that antiquated hierarchies of corrupt power cannot hold back the tides of revolution for long.
Director, screenwriter: Leila Kilani
Cast: Ifham Mathet, Ikram Layachi, Bahia Boutia El Oumani, Mustafa Shimdat, Jaafar Brigui
Producers: Leila Kilani, Emmanuel Barrault
Cinematography: Eric Devin
Editing: Tina Baz
Production design: Emmanuel Barrault
Sound design: Laurent Malan
Music: Michel Deneuve, Wilkimix
Production companies: Socco Chico Films (Morocco), DKB Productions (France)
World sales: DKB Productions (France)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger competition)
In Arabic, French and Spanish
127 minutes
