Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s gate) consists of a series of reconstructed situations based on observations made on the border of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil, providing the scene for an intense trafficking of manufactured goods, sold at discounted prices. Every day, thousands of people work there. The film portrays this “doorway to Europe,” a place where a murky economy of semi-legal exchanges takes place across a border anomaly. The border is represented by painted lines across the tarmac. Across these surfaces, Maroufi choreographs a slow ritualistic ballet of gestures and rites, shot from above. The camera pans across the infinite lines of people waiting with bundles and parcels containing food, appliances, clothes, and various other goods, all of which will pass through checkpoints, in a back and forth between smugglers and border control officers.
Randa Maroufi, Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s Gate), 2019, 19 min
Production
Barney Production & Montfleuri Production.
Support
La Fondation des Artistes (FR), Doha Film Institute (QAT), CNC (FR), Kamel Lazaar Foundation (TUN), AFAC (LBN), La Casa de Velázquez (FR), Le Fresnoy (FR), France 2 (FR).
Randa Maroufi is an artist whose practice moves between photography, video, and installation. Her work maintains an elastic relationship to reality. Many of her projects are developed in close collaboration with communities she is connected to, though not necessarily part of. The scenes she creates depict a strange kind of reality; one that, though factually accurate, forges an ethical connection to lived experience. Her films Le Park (2015) and Bab Sebta (2019), awarded at several festivals, mark the beginning of a trilogy dedicated to three Moroccan cities. L’mina (2025) is the final chapter of this trilogy. She graduated from the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Angers, and Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Born in 1987 in Casablanca (Morocco).