18/06/2008

Around the corner from the tarmacked roads of a Belgian military camp, Mourad Boucif is in the middle of shooting his third feature, Silver Tears, on which some 100 extras have been immersed in the battle of Ernage since late May.

Not without difficulty, Les Films de Nour (Belgium) and Les Films du Météore (Morocco) finally managed to get the film off the ground and start shooting.

Producer Vanessa Brichaut explained: "The project has been underway since 2001, but the complexity of an intercontinental co-production between Africa and Europe, as well as the release of the acclaimed film Days of Glory [+see also:
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film profile] in 2006, didn’t help matters. Even though Days of Glory helped make people more aware of a little-known subject, unfortunately it overshadowed our production".

Silver Tears retraces the experiences of Sulayman, a young Moroccan villager who is reluctantly enlisted in 1939 in a battalion of Moroccan infantrymen. Although the film centres above all on the individual journeys of its protagonists, the four-week shoot in Belgium reconstructs the battle of Ernage (May 14-15, 1940), which saw the retreat of German troops, at the expense of heavy losses on the allied side.

On set, the extras – most of them young Belgian men of Moroccan origin – admit that there was never any mention of this bloody episode in their history books.

The title is backed by the Film and Audiovisual Centre of the French Community of Belgium and the Vlaams Audiovisual Fund. The Moroccan Film Centre also granted production funding, as did Moroccan television network 2M. Negotiations are currently underway with a French partner.

The shoot will relocate to the Agadir region (Morocco) for two weeks in October.

(Translated from French)