Dr. Pamela Nice boasts a 25 year career in the free lance industry. This includes various projects as a stage director, playwright and most recently, documentary film maker. It is the documentary film making that led her to Morocco.
After being bombarded with endless questions regarding Moroccan people from students in her 20th century Arab literature and film class, Dr. Nice decided it was time to put those questions into a film. Being an educated film maker, she knew there was no better place to obtain answers to these questions than straight from the Moroccan people themselves. Armed with a Fulbright Fellowship, Dr. Nice set off for a new educational classroom to teach students in Morocco. Outside of the classroom, she would take a different path and find answers to those questions of her students back home.
As the project got underway, Dr. Nice remarked that her hopes were to change the way Americans viewed Moroccan and Muslim people. After the events of September 11th, she felt there was a strong need to build a bridge over the gap in American and Moroccan culture. She hopes to use various interviews with the Morocco youth alongside portrayals of daily life in Morocco as the building block for change between the two cultures. The daily portrayals included such events as the Casablanca soccer derby, Morocco hip hop concerts and Eid celebrations.
The traditional American view of Morocco is as the picture perfect post card that paints the region as a scenic vacation destination. To change this view within the American culture, Dr. Nice interviewed over 60 Moroccan citizens between the ages of 18 and 30. Many of these individuals were students she had in the classroom. Others were part of a lecture tour she engaged on. Still others were average, every day people that Dr. Nice came in contact with each day on the streets of Rabat. Her friends back home provided her with additional contacts from people they knew. All provided a fair representation of varying social, ethnic, and religious observance groups.
All of these individuals were more than eager to discuss life in Morocco. Through these interviews, Dr. Nice discovered that Moroccan youths are faced with many of the same issues as the American youth back home in her classroom. Each group expresses a concern with hopes, dreams and daily struggles. Each is also concerned with how the other group views them. By compiling these interviews into a documentary film, Dr. Nice starts to gently etch away at stereotypes between the two youth cultures.
…more on Morocco Film
by Sam Mitchell
