Female Mobility in Moroccan Cinema: Victimhood vs. Agency

This paper seeks to address the conflicting approaches towards gender migration reflected in Moroccan cinema. Les Oublies de l’Histoire is a Moroccan Belgium production directed by the Moroccan cineaste Hassan Ben Jelloun. The film contemplates the female subversive attitude shaped by the evolution of “culture of migration” that stands as the inevitable corollary of patriarchal impositions and injustice. Female characters resort to a new space where there is a previewed possibility to emerge. The cineaste offers traditionally a different vision of Moroccan women by reconfiguring the traditional role of women to include marks of subversion. In this light, I will explain how the female migrant in the film adopts a strategy of mobility that goes beyond detracting the position of barriers. Having been duped by the unsafe specular representation of the modern consumer society, which involves sentiments of utmost dehumanization of sex trafficking, I will discuss the extent to which the female migrants find it quite impossible to be real agents of their mobility.