Decolonising co-authorship at the interstices of Third and Fourth Cinema: Amussu

Amussu (2019) – ‘movement’ in Tamazight, the language of the indigenous Amazigh people of North Africa – was made by Nadir Bouhmouch in collaboration with the ‘Local Film Committee of Imider,’ 1 part of a small, Tamazight-speaking community of villages in southeast Morocco. The film recounts the Imider’s resistance to the biggest silver mine in Africa, part-owned by the Moroccan royal family. This chapter will analyse how Bouhmouch collaborated with the Local Film Committee of Imider to decolonise form, incorporating indigenous oral traditions into the structure and aesthetic of Amussu’s message of resistance. In so doing, Amussu revives earlier critical and theoretical interventions by Moroccan filmmaker and intellectual Ahmed Bouanani around the place of indigenous culture within the (post-colonial) nation. The film’s focus on pre-colonial, indigenous traditions extends towards new forms of praxis in collaborative documentary filmmaking, whereby the act of theorising in relation to collaborative authorship and Third Cinema as political filmmaking itself forms part of this new approach. Inspired by ‘agraw’ – pre-colonial structures of horizontal, democratic governance originating from within the community – Bouhmouch worked with the Local Film Committee of Imider to apply this form of indigenous, collective decision-making to all stages of the film’s development, production and post-production. A detailed analysis of Amussu’s unique production history and the specific socio-political and cultural context in which it was forged will lead in this chapter to a consideration of what lies in the space between Third and Fourth Cinema and the possibilities (for both film theory and praxis) that this interstitial space offers for decolonising form and engaging in a genuine process of active, collaborative authorship between a non-indigenous filmmaker and an indigenous community in the far south of Morocco.