Ouarzazate, cinema city

Ouarzazate, the new Hollywood

Ouarzazate’s magnificent landscapes, radiant light and ideal climatic conditions have always drawn filmmakers to the region. Louis Lumière himself filmed his “Chevalier Marocain” there as far back as 1897! Jacques Becker made his version of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves there in 1954, with the unforgettable Fernandel in the starring role, and David Lean’s masterly “Lawrence of Arabia” followed in 1962. In the 1980s, the movie industry began a  full-scale assault on the region, and numbers of big-budget films have since been made there, including Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun”,Lewis Teague’s “Jewel of the Nile”, Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Sheltering Sky”, Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven”, and Alain Chabat’s “Astérix et Obélix”.
The town now contains three large studios. The Atlas Studios were set up in 1983, are open to the public, and are certainly well worth going out of your way to see. Behind their doors, guarded by gigantic pharaohs, you can wander through a host of amazing sets, peek into the workshops where they are created, and get a real idea of what goes on behind the scenes in the movie industry.

Ouarzazate’s movie industry school

Another attraction is the town’s Museum of Cinematography, which is housed in a former Italian studio from the 1990s. The exterior may appear typically Moroccan, but once across the threshold, visitors find themselves stepping from Ancient Greece to the Middle East of days gone by, from church patio to grim dungeon. Amazingly authentic as they may seem, all the sets here are created out of plaster! All in all, a novel way of acquainting yourself the remarkable know-how of the local craftsmen.
Ouarzazate attracts filmmakers from all over the world, along with those enamoured of the seventh art and its creations. In order to meet the very considerable demand for human resources in terms of movie-making professionals, Ouarzazate now has its own training institute, whose students learn the ins and outs of the industry and its various branches – “film sets and machinery”, “production management” “set decoration and props”, “hairstyling and makeup”, “costumes and dressing”, and “special effects”.