São Paulo – Later this year, the county of Mazagão, Amapá state, will have its own documentary on its Moroccan origins, with the shooting taking place locally and also in Morocco. The city was settled by immigrants coming from the Arab country in the eighteen century and the story will be told by a movie produced by production company Castanha. The lives of a man and a woman born in Mazagão will take center stage in the documentary.
The focus of the movie is, actually the district of Mazagão Velho, which originated the country and where the Moroccans landed. That is the place where the History teacher Josiane Brito, 29 years old, and farmer Jozué Videira, 48 years old, were born, and their lives intertwined with immigration and its legacy will be portrayed by the documentary. In March, the two of them spent four days in El Jadida, the Moroccan city where the immigrants came from, together with the movie’s director, Canadian Gavin Andrews, and a producer.
The immigrants that settled Mazagão, however, were not Arabs, but Portuguese and non-Arab Africans. They were brought to Brazil by Portugal, once the European country lost the control of the current El Jadida to Muslims. The Mazagão Velho community retells the story of this journey every year in a celebration called Party of São Tiago, which takes place in July. But in the staging that occurs during the party, in which Christians and Portuguese fight against the Moors, the victory belongs to the former.
Director Andrews says that one of the purposes of the trip taken by Josiane and Jozué was for them to listen to the other version of the story, the one belonging to the Arab-Muslims. What really happened is that the Portuguese fled Morocco after losing control of the region, says the filmmaker. According to the Canadian director, both of them were very emotional with this return to the origins. The city of El Jadida organized an event around this trip by both Amapá residents, with the presence of representatives of the local city hall and of Brazil’s ambassador in Rabat, José Humberto de Brito Cruz.
The two were chosen by the documentary’s director and are seen by him as the carriers of the Mazagão Velho’s story, especially to the young people. “They are very proud of their past”, says Andrews. Josiane doesn’t live at the place anymore, she teaches classes in another place, but comes back every weekend. Jozué is described by Andrews as someone who mobilizes culturally, since he teaches music and creates cultural activities with residents of Mazagão Velho.
Both of them will now pass on to other members of the community what they heard and lived in El Jadida. According to Andrews, the ending of the play at Festa de São Tiago, in which Christians are the winners, is based in what happened at the Iberian Peninsula after the eighth century, when it was controlled by the Moors and later went back under Christian rule. The filmmaker says that his movie is not focused on the party, on which he already made an ethnographic documentary for the Institute of National Artistic and Historical Heritage (Iphan).
The current documentary came from Andrews’ interest by the topic. Living in Amapá for almost 15 years already, the filmmaker knew the story. The party of Mazagão Velho is one of the main cultural events of the state. Due to his willingness to bring the story to the screen, he travelled to El Jadida in 2002 for research. The opportunity to shoot came with a public notice by the National Film Agency (Ancine) in 2014. The project was approved last year and shooting started in 2016. In January, they shot in Mazagão.
The script was written by Andrews and Cassandra Oliveira is co-director. The movie is produced by Castanha in a partnership with production company Espaço Vídeo, from Roraima. In addition to covering the origins, the film also shows the concerns by the residents with an eventual cultural transformation of Mazagão Velho, which nowadays can be reached through a ferry (in the past, there were two ferryboats) crossing a river but that soon will have a bridge.
Andrews came back from Morocco last weekend and will start post-production soon. If necessary, he will be back to Mazagão Velho in May to shoot again. Currently, the director is living in Rio de Janeiro. The movie needs to be completed until the end of October, according to the requirements of the public notice from which it received the resources. It will be screened, in its first year, in state-owned TV channels.
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani