The Breadwinner
(Loqmat 'Aich)

Ready to jump forward, the women wait there like pebbles washed up on the pavements or lean against the walls of streets lined with bourgeois markets in downtown Casablanca. This is the 1960s, the women are Berbers who have left their villages to join the slums of Hay Mohammadi or other districts to earn their living as day cleaners or sometimes prostitutes. Filmed secretly, these highly undesirable images of an underclass in post-colonial Morocco persist, along with their racial, ethnic, social and gender inequalities, in the wake of the uprisings harshly repressed by Hassan II and the imposed “state of emergency”. Unfinished, Mohamed Abbazzi’s Breadwinner (1969) (the French title: La Longue Journée) bears the mark of an epoch. Unearthed as a rough cut and with none of the original directly recorded sound, the raw rendering of this silent but attentive observation of these women without images conveys a violence that crosses time to reach us here and now. JB