Amok (1982): A Pan-African film with transnational aspirations

This article attempts to foreground the Pan-African concerns in Souheil Ben-Barka’s Amok (1982). This film has been consistently ignored in African cinema scholarship even though it documents one of the most authoritarian political regimes in South Africa, i.e. the Apartheid political system. Although the film was made in the 1980s, a time best known for the establishment of national African cinemas, its primary concern is beyond the notion of nationhood, opening up therefore the possibility of reading and thinking about African films beyond national boundaries. Grounded in the Pan-Africanist cinema agenda and deorbiting from narrowed national concerns, Amok offers an intriguing way to explore African cinemas’ different trajectories. That said, the article focuses on how the film thematically and aesthetically reverberates with Pan-Africanism while concomitantly subscribing to the transnational cinematic turn. The article also examines how the film, given its time of production and transnational orientations, brings to the fore the limitedness of the current research on Moroccan cinema as a potential transnational film industry that started to take shape only at the turn of the century with no critical attention to earlier cinematic experiences despite their transnational underpinnings.