Mellah of Tinghir

Kamal Hachkar went back to Tinghir to make a film about the Jews who left. The mellah was crumbling but not empty — Muslim families live in the houses now.

The mezuzah marks are still on the doorframes. Small rectangular indentations where Jewish residents once fixed prayer scrolls. Nobody has filled them in.

Hachkar interviewed elderly Amazigh neighbours who remembered the Jewish families by name. Then he went to Israel and found those families in development towns in the Negev. They wept when he told them he was from their town.

'Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes of the Mellah' won Best New Director at the Tangier Film Festival, 2013. The cemetery overlooks the palmery. Tombstones facing Jerusalem, four thousand kilometres east.