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To locals, it is the door of the desert, a unique-looking city with breath-taking Kasbahs. To the international film industry, Ouarzazate is the perfect film-location. The city that managed to attract the biggest movie directors and the best Hollywood productions.
Films such as «Lawrence of Arabia», «Gladiator», and «The Last Temptation of Christ», were shot in the city, bringing job opportunities to hundreds of local actors, extras and artisans. The tradition was carried on throughout the years, granting Ouarzazate a great reputation within the industry and helping its inhabitants secure decent incomes.
The flourishing city, however, has had to deal, like many others around the world, with the pandemic. The global health crisis, the closing of the country’s borders, the lockdown and the economic repercussions that hit several international film producers have weighed hard on the cities’ inhabitants.
Foreign film production and local actors
Exclusively dependent on the film industry, local actors and extras from Ouarzazate said goodbye to the last 2020 foreign crew a few weeks before the start of the health crisis.
«One of the last international productions that was shooting in the city left the a little before the lockdown, it was an Indonesian crew that halted production because of Covid-19», Essahouli Younes who hires extras for similar productions in the city told Yabiladi.
His company, Casting Morocco, was immensely affected by the health crisis. «My company, like many others operating in the same field, has been struggling this year», Essahouli explained. «We used to have 3 to 4 productions a month and that drastically decreased, with few local productions in the advertisement and music sectors».
In addition to local productions, foreign ones remain the most rewarding for the city’s actors. According to Essahouli, «foreign productions in normal times can hire between 50 and 120 extras a day with wages starting at 500 dh a day, while local productions hire less people starting from 300 dirhams for a day of work».
And as many international crews have left the city due to the pandemic, actors like those hired by Essahouli are left with the few local productions currently operating in Ouarzazate.
«For most of the people I used to recruit, the movie industry is the only thing they do for a living. Some of them have relied on this for years and years and now they are basically jobless», Essahouli regretted.
2020, the worst year in the history of film production in Ouarzazate
Indeed, numbers shared by national film body Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) reveal how hard this year has been on the film industry. In 2019, 21 international productions were shot in Ouarzazate, compared to 2020 which had two productions, with a third one that couldn’t resume due to the pandemic.
The drop is massive when compared to the previous years, when foreign productions in the city were exceeding 10 yearly since 2013. More data indicate that the year 2020 would be the worst one in the history of film production in Ouarzazate in the last 10 years.
According to the CCM, foreign productions from the cinema industry earned approximately 796 million dirhams during 2019, while the investment budget by Moroccan productions was estimated at more than 452 million dirhams during the same year.
Relying on local production
These numbers are hard to find in 2020, especially with the lockdown period, which was a disaster for the industry. According to head of the film commission and the promotion of filming in Ouarzazate Said Anadam, during the lockdown «production stopped completely».
«As we all know the movie industry cannot work from home, so even sectors that work directly with it, such as companies that rent filming equipment, restaurants, car rental firms and so on, have been greatly affected», he explained.
Currently, the city is trying to adapt to the situation and work with what’s currently available. «A Brazialian series was shooting in Morocco before the crisis and we hope that they will return to finish what they started», he indicated.
Meanwhile, Anadam revealed that the city is now relying heavily on Moroccan projects. «We are trying to enhance local productions, and encourage the producers to shoot in the region, in order to maintain the continuity of work for technicians and actors», he concluded.
Like many other sectors, the film industry in the city of Ouarzazate depends heavily on the reopening of borders and a positive development of the epidemiological situation in the country. Until then, the sector will have to deal with the repercussions of the health crisis.
