Jajouka, something good comes to you - A film by Marc Hurtado and Éric Hurtado - Étant Donnés - (France, 2012, 62’, Super 16mm transféré en numérique)
« ... Like a thorn on silk...» Chant des femmes de Jajouka
Jajouka, a small village in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. For over 2,000 years, magic fertility rites have been performed there, the rites of Pan, akin to the Roman Lupercales, along with unique music played by a brother- hood of musicians called The Master Musicians of Jajouka. When Brion Gysin, inventor of the Dreamachine, discovered the village in the 50s, he described them as heirs of the great 12th-century Persian poet, Farid Al-Din Attar, au- thor of the initiatory poem “The Conference of the Birds,” a key work in the Sufi spiritual tradition.
An entire fringe group of artists, musicians and writers, in the wake of Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, were drawn to Jajouka: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones who recorded their first album; Ornette Coleman, founder of free jazz; William S. Burroughs; LSD guru Timothy Leary; and more recently mu- sicians such as Genesis P-Orridge or Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth.
Eric and Marc Hurtado, founders of the group Etant Donnés, set out to film these Pan devotees, musicians who use their music for miraculous healing rituals held at the tomb of the village saint, Sidi Ahmed Sheikh.
The film is polarized by the attraction between Bou Jeloud (the Father of Skins / Pan) and Aïsha Kandisha, woman-demoness, goddess of the night and springs.
He is gold, she is silver... A child runs like the wind, chased and whipped by Bou Jeloud’s olive switches... Aïsha hears and stands vigil... She waits for Bou Jeloud near nocturnal rivers... She is dangerous, he is the Father of Fear.
A film of violent poetry that treads the line between documentary and fic- tion (but legends can be fiction ?), whose action is rooted in the trance of the ritual and its musical madness, to be reflected in a child’s tear, a flame, an eternal women’s chant addressed to men and the heavens.
