Le Magicien [The Magician], (2003) is presented as the capture of a performance by Abdelouahid El Hamri, the 'Sinbad of the Straight', an old magician that performed for birthday parties in Tanger when Yto Barrada was a child. The show unfolds at an almost domestic level. The complicity is evident between the filmmaker and her subject, who speaks to her freely and executes his tricks while commenting them, like a demonstration, an animated 'manual' of Tangerian magic.

El Hamri reveals himself to us in costume before shaking the wobbly table where he officiates and intones several incantations, cigarette in hand. Follows an outdated performance, at times executed with a detached slowness and others on a solemn note, and carried out in darija – the local Arabic dialect -, mixed with French and a bit of English. El Hamri shows his manipulations, sometimes failing to produce the desired effect without losing countenance, mentions his 'tricks' calls himself a magician and a fakir, invokes God and the djinns. After having put an unfortunate rooster to sleep – “it isn't easy” – El Hamri presents Omar, his son and successor who performs a single trick before being sent backstage where he manages the accessories. After a final demonstration, the magician folds his costume with care into a trunk that seems to have traveled through time.

Barrada captures a fragment of Tanger, 'international' city, and space of unstable cultural collage, both fabulous and disastrous. The magician plays with dispossession and cultures by mobilizing systems of belief and knowledge that don't have him fooled. Religion, superstition, references to art, and phony spells create a vibrant combination. Illusion is not the real purpose. We are witnessing a ritual based on a tacit contract with the spectators: a renewable and shared fiction.

With frontal framing and brief sequences separated by black screens, Yto Barrada describes the experience of a show from one end to the other. The artist documents a magic that lets its inner-workings show, by using another type of magic that is less transparent. Cinema holds a fundamental place in his practice, as it does in the Arab world, where Egyptian cinema in particular circulated very early on from one country to another, crossing dialects and carrying non-occidental melodies, stories and characters with it.

Marie Muracciole, 2020
Translated by Mia Stern, 2021