Trances (El hal)

Dutch premiere

Contagious fly-on-the-wall portrait of the musicians of Nass El Ghiwane, also know as the Rolling Stones of Morocco. With their intoxicating instrumentation, complex rhythms and pacifistic lyrics they have been one of the most influential bands of the Moroccan counterculture. For Martin Scorsese the film Trances was the reason to start the World Cinema Project. He saw the film on a New-York tv-channel during the editing of the King of Comedy, and used Nass El Ghiwane’s music in The Last Temptation of Christ. 

Ahmed El Maanouni (Morocco)
Morocco | 1981 | 87 min
Arabic spoken, English subtitled

Ahmed El Maanouni (1944, Casablanca) is a screenwriter, film director, cinematographer, actor and producer born in Casablanca. His film Alyam Alyam (1978) was the first Moroccan film to be selected in Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prize at the Mannheim film festival.

'Trances’ is part of 'Scorsese Chooses' a selection of films as part of the big Martin Scorsese exhibition in EYE. Trances was the first film to be to preserved and restored as part of his World Cinema Project. Scorsese about the film: 

“Both a concert movie and a free-form audiovisual experiment, Ahmed El Maânouni’s Trances is cinematic poetry”.