French-Moroccan documentarian Simone Bitton opens her newest film by recognising the supposed contradictions that plagued her eponymous subject's legacy. As writer, journalist and intellectual Edmond Amran El Maleh himself wrote: “I am a Moroccan Jew. It makes no sense to question what cannot be questioned.” In The Thousand and One Days of Hajj Edmond, which has just had its world premiere in the Moroccan Panorama strand of the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, the writer-director pens a dually personal and political reflection on the legacy of El Maleh, narrating the film herself. The existing oeuvre of writer-director Bitton very persistently lies at the intersection of exile, resistance and religio-national identities beyond the construct of the Westphalian nation-state regime, including Palestine: Story of a Land (1993), Wall (2004) and Ziyara (2021), the last of which is also committed to tracing Jewish memory in Morocco. Her latest film continues this effort.

For the relevance of the personal perspective on this film, Bitton herself was born in Morocco, holds both Israeli and French citizenship, and self-describes as both a Moroccan national and an Arab Jew. She acknowledges this openly in a heated line: “Our Jewish voices are needed, Hajj. Now more than ever before. But you are no longer here to speak alongside me. You have left me utterly alone. How can I continue your legacy?” As well as learning about Bitton’s own activism, we also find out about El Maleh’s dedicated condemnation of Zionism and celebration of poets like Mahmoud Darwish; for him, the flight of Jews from Morocco mirrors the oppression of groups like the Palestinians in Israel today.

Bitton, who narrates the film as if speaking to the deceased El Maleh, embarks on a personal and political reflection of the writer’s work. This narrative is strung together with anecdotes from friends and others who knew him well, including his longtime domestic worker Lkbira Benjaïdia and visual artist Khalil El Ghrib. The film’s title is also an homage to one of El Maleh’s own books, Mille ans, un jour.

While the film isn’t strictly a biographical documentary, context sometimes feels overly limited in Bitton’s film – but we glean enough to gain a sense of his background as a Moroccan Jew who came from a somewhat well-off family. Notably, he was a member of the Moroccan Communist Party and was extremely outspoken in activist circles regarding Moroccan independence; he later moved to Paris while still devoting the content of his literary work to his home country. The writer-director is quite casual and raw with how she handles the talking-head interviews and archival footage, almost as if collating a personal diary.

Much of the film is dedicated to El Maleh’s surviving friends and acquaintances reading a diverse selection of excerpts from his oft-poetic writing. While insightful in their own right, we don’t hear directly from El Maleh himself until nearly halfway through, when we see a video clip of him from 2004 speaking to the camera. This choice makes one wonder just why his distinct voice is constantly mediated through other people or through text on screen: is it just a lack of archival material, or is his legacy in words really best experienced through the voices of those who believed in him?

Many times, space to really take in his words is not available to the viewer, who must consume his prose in rapid succession without having time to absorb the meaning. This might be a disappointing outcome to viewers who have never encountered his writing. But this issue is also touched on in the film, where frustrated friends note that his writing is so rarely accessible for the general public. In some ways, The Thousand and One Days of Hajj Edmond is a quiet call to re-recognise the brilliant eponymous writer – and to acknowledge his work and thought as something truly remarkable.

A Thousand and One Days of Hajj Edmond is a Moroccan-French co-production by Iris Prod and Haut les Mains. Its world sales are up for grabs.