Quick Trip to Manhattan in Marrakech

The Marrakech Film Festival marked a half decade birthday this year, and two weekends ago a friend and I unexpectedly partook in the celebration. While walking around the rose-washed city we stumbled upon one of the many red carpets that marked entrances to festival cinemas. Suddenly, by coincidence and by my friend's savvy habit of keeping our passports in his super-hero utility belt, we had our names laser-emblazoned onto full access badges. So within a few hours we were off in our backpackers' finest (aka clean clothes) to see an American entry to the festival, Man Push Cart.

More than half of the Marrakech festival films are not official entrees, but tributes and hommages. This year for example was a tribute to the opus of Martin Scorscese and so Raging Bull, Goodfellas and (my favorite) Kundun (which was actually filmed in Morocco - as if the Chinese government would let a film about Tibetan occupation be filmed in China!) were billed alongside the dozen or so Festival premieres.

A sizable portion of the threatre goers we sat with for Man Push Cart were neither film enthusiasts nor tourists but rather local teenagers set on yelling out lewd remarks when anything remotely sexual was shown onscreen....I hoped that the director was not present to hear the antics. The film we saw was the story of a Pakistani immigrant to the US who won his daily bread selling coffee and bagels in one of the shiny dimpled aluminum carts that are ubiquitous on Manhattan's street corners. Man Push Cart depicted Manhattan in the early hours of the morning, where penumbras cover the faces of the army of workers whose professions are rarely thought of by most New Yorkers; the street cleaners, the sanitation department, the delivery men and the kiosk vendors. Man Push Cart's candid approach was far from up-lifting and the experience joined Hurricane Katrina as surreal reflections on America from abroad.