Mohamed El Khatib
Directing
Biography
Mohamed El Khatib is a French playwright, stage director and director born in the Loiret in 1980. He studied Letters at Khâgne, briefly studied at Sciences Po and at the Centro de Arte Dramático A. C. (CADAC). In 2008, he co-founded with friends a collective called Zirlib. Some of his plays include Finir en beauté (2005), Moi, Corinne Dadat (2015), Stadium (2017), C’est la vie (2017), and La Dispute (2019). In 2018, he traveled with his camera from Orléans, France to Tangier, Morocco aboard a Renault 12, filming a documentary of the same name.
Known For
French current affair show
Infrarouge
In collaboration with AIDES, an association fighting against HIV, this feature film brings together over 30 artists to explore the freedom to love beyond stereotypes. Desire, passion, break-ups, Grand Amour or the modern version of the freedom to love. All stories are told across genders and sexualities.
Grand amour
It was aboard the legendary and sturdy Peugeot 504 and Renault 12 that most North African families made the "route du bled," a ritual return to their homeland for summer vacations in Morocco or Algeria. The film chronicles a summer migration across the Mediterranean from the 1970s to the 1990s. The memory of these epic journeys punctuates the history of North Africans in France with bittersweet nostalgia, where travel stories blend industrial automotive heritage with personal memories.
504
Shortly after his mother’s passing, playwright and stage director Mohamed El Khatib receives a phone call from his uncle in Bab Berred, the family’s village in the Moroccan Rif, instructing him to come as soon as possible to collect his inheritance – mysteriously insisting that he should make the trip in a Renault 12. Coaxed by his father, El Khatib decides to make the journey from Orléans to Tangier. Structured like a road movie, Renault 12 is also the filmmaker’s quest to discover his own origins, in which he both documents chance encounters and stages situations to bring social, political, and cultural landscapes to light.