Documentary was an unpopular form of film-making in an already meagre film industry dominated by men in Morocco in the 1970s and 1980s. Together with Farida Bourquia, who made television documentaries, Izza Génini was the first Moroccan woman truly devoted to the documentary. Génini produced Transes by Ahmed El Maanouni in 1981 and from then on directed her own documentaries, mostly concerned with music and performances, starting with the ethnographic Aita in 1987. Transes is a concert film about Nass El Ghiwane, a popular Moroccan folk rock band, and marks Génini's initial steps in a reappraisal of her home country and exploration of her musical inheritance. During the French Protectorate, Génini explains, many educated Moroccans, including herself, turned their backs on their own culture, preferring instead to direct their gaze towards France. ‘Like others in my generation I rejected Moroccan culture because I thought it was inferior to the French. Our dreams of emancipation were directed towards the West’ (Hillauer, 2005: 349). When she finally started to look back at Morocco, she experienced an emotional reconnection with the country's musical heritage. This personal journey has continued to define her film-making practice.

Born in 1942 in Casablanca, her parents took her with them to France in 1960, where she studied literature at the Sorbonne and became involved in festivals and the exhibition of films. Génini has made over twenty films, most of which deal with Moroccan music and its multicultural origins or the intercultural exchange that has defined Moroccan music, and Jewish– Arab relationships in Morocco. Most of her documentaries deal with women performers, and the very particular role these performers take up in the wider societal context. This chapter concentrates on Génini's first of her more than twenty films, Aita (1987) and her last one, La Nûba d'Or et de Lumière (2007). As she has been based in Paris for such a long time, for some her transnational identity excludes her from Moroccan cinema history as a diasporic film-maker. However, as I will illustrate, Moroccan cinema is an inherently transnational experience, and Génini's experience of Morocco revolves around the heritage as well as the diversity of the country.