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“Casanegra is an ode to friendship, in which dreams and hopes grow in a new generation of Moroccans,” declares award-winning cinematographer Luca Coassin, AIC ( L’estate di mio fratello (My brother’s summer), La Ritirata (Retreating), Occhi di cristallo (Eyes of Crystal)).
“The feature represents not only a new approach to filmmaking in Morocco, but it also sends out a strong signal for change for the country and, indeed, the whole Arabian world.”
Casanegra focuses on two young men who live in a run-down part of Casablanca; part of the city ‘tainted’, in Coassin’s words, by an over-development of Art Deco and Colonial architecture. “Casanegra literally means the black city in the sense of the dark side of the city, a place where there is no dignity,” explains Coassin. “Buildings were sited far too close to each other, without a care about space. The film’s visual construction opens with these buildings, develops in the characters’ faces and ends with them imprisoned within their stories. It was fundamental that we shot entirely on location.”
Friends since childhood, Adil (Omar Lotfi) and Karim (Anas El Baz) live on their wits. They exploit and are exploited in a multi-cultural city where hardship and violence are commonplace and life has little or no value. But they dream: one wants to emigrate, albeit illegally, to Malmö, Sweden, and the other decides to change his street pedalling life and support his sister’s schooling – but then he falls in love. In a moment of truth, they are hired by a local mobster to execute a mission that could change their lives. “Casanegra is the tale of their dilemmas. A tale of hope and despair; a love story between two young adults and their city – a city that doesn’t love them back,” states Coassin.
“Despite the fact that the production company owns three HD cameras and there was a restricted budget, we still chose to shoot on film. It was the only way to tell the story,” says Coassin who had worked with Norwegian-based Moroccan screenwriter/director Nour Eddine Lakhmari on a number of previous occasions. “Every time we collaborate I rediscover the pleasure of expressive freedom and the opportunity to surprise each other by our work. We first talked about Casanegra a year ago when we were in the middle of shooting a television series and we even stopped a take to have an energetic debate. If we could represent our partnership in a film, it would be about two children who play together.”
Film noir
Throughout the shoot Coassin used a Moviecam Compact camera with Zeiss High Speed 1.3 lenses and KODAK VISION2 500T 5218 (sometimes exposed at 1000 ASA). Originally intended as a black-and-white film, Casanegra was treated instead in the film noir genre. “I found that challenging, but realised I couldn’t completely remove the colours from this city and the stories within it,” he says. “The first task was to desaturate the shapes, and subsequently the faces, and keep the different skin colours close to each other. In my opinion this isn’t a distraction from the story. I spent a great deal of time on visual perception and tried to speed up eye movements to create increased aggressiveness.”
Coassin actively pursued visual simplicity, even on very complex frames and scenes, but his determination not to compromise proved challenging. “I maintained a realist framing and let the lights and shadows on the characters’ faces reveal their dreams and anger, rather than attempt to find academic solutions. My inspiration was in a simple but telling sentence by Édouard Manet: ‘... look after the big light and the big shadow in a shape and everything else will come by itself.’ Meanwhile, I tried to create a parallel visual track with the buildings and the city. In this way, I emulated our masters of light, even if on tiptoe” says the DP, a student of Giuseppe Rotunno, (AIC, ASC).
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Ghita Tazi (Nabila) with Anas El Baz (Karim) |
“I worked on the chromatics for the anticipated bleach bypass and experimented with some different visual combinations in Casablanca’s stimulating urban environment. I pushed the background hues without affecting the actors’ skins and desaturated their faces in relation to the environment and vice versa. The audience will be guided through a path of multi-coloured and bi-chromatic scenes: a story in colour which, in some aspects, appears as black-and-white.”
13 takes
“During pre-production Nour Eddine told me about a three-minute sequence in which the camera starts at second-floor height from a crane, crosses a street, then passes through four rooms in a building. I said: ‘Machi mouchkil’ (‘No problem!’). I started with the camera on a Steadicam on the crane and captured the whole street in the difficult initial frame which I’d had to light stealthily from rooftops. Continuity and emotions were important to the scene which needed 13 takes, but I was happy with the final result. Shooting in Casablanca can be disarming but it can also be exhilarating. For the first time in my life I shot a 300-foot reel in a camera car for four miles along Casablanca’s main avenue taking my eye from the viewfinder – and the first take was good!”
Graphic shadows
In a violent scene in which the actors and the director had complete freedom, the stepfather of one of the main characters beats his wife and stepson. “I wanted graphic shadows, well-defined details on the faces and skin, cosy lighting and aggressive blacks and set the shutter alternately to 90º and 45º in an intended discontinuity. Nour Eddine and I decided to use a handheld camera and, instead of illuminating the night interior scene with diffused lighting, I asked the actors to be part of the violence by guiding us by turns to the amber lights on the scene that shone from outside through two 2000w spots. It gave me the opportunity to obtain an extreme bichromatic effect in which pain and rage are initially hidden, then suddenly reveal themselves. The silence of the crew after each take confirmed that this evil scene could not have been achieved otherwise. The audience will recall it vividly.”
Casanegra is the first Moroccan film to use D.I. for color grading and finishing. “A bleach bypass was originally planned, but after the edit we unexpectedly had the opportunity to do a D.I., so I was able to obtain the same effect but with total control,” says Coassin. “It wasn’t possible to undertake the work in Morocco, so we transferred the negative to Augustuscolor in Rome and used Quantel’s Pablo 4K system. I tried to invoke the same enthusiasm there as we had on set and the staff’s reaction was excellent. We achieved exactly what we wanted and were able to control the desaturisation scene by scene and refine some shading.”
Nearly all of Casanegra was shot at night in the centre of Casablanca and, although the crew were under constant escort, the experience proved to be enriching rather than frightening. “During the two-month shoot, a couple of fundamentalist terror attacks took place quite close to our locations, which obviously touched the mood of the people working with me, and Casablanca as a whole,” says Coassin. “Apart from myself, the 1st AD and the sound engineer, the crew was entirely Moroccan, but the condemnation was unanimous.”
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Luca Coassin, AIC prepares to shoot |
Casanegra sets out to give an honest answer to each of these questions: What is life really like for young Moroccans before they consider emigrating? What is their true culture? What do they dream about? And what makes them tick? “Beyond its riveting story, it lends humanity to the large numbers of disenchanted Moroccan youth that are shown only as victims in the headlines,” concludes Coassin who scooped Best Cinematographer award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival.
Casanegra is produced by Sigma, Morocco.
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