Through cinema, we discover cities. Some of them we may never visit. However, even without having seen them, these cities exist first and develop in our imagination thanks to cinema. Think of Woody Allen's New York, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Paris, Almodovar's Madrid or Wong Kar Wai's Hong Kong.

Michael Curtiz's film, which celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2022, made Casablanca a legend. That of a mythical, glamorous, cosmopolitan, romantic and erotic city… an image that she would have a hard time getting rid of in the 120 or so films that followed, which had Casablanca as their location or plot. With Curtiz's film, the city of Casablanca entered into legend, yes, but on a great misunderstanding. Indeed, this film does not develop a "Moroccan" story, was not filmed there and the city is only present there through a cardboard decor and a few distant silhouettes of Moroccans in djellaba.

If the history between Casablanca and cinema is ambiguous, the story is nevertheless old. From the 20s, the cinemas multiplied in the city. Multipurpose rooms or real cinema-monuments such as the Rialto or the Vox, there were more than 60 in the city in the heart of the 50s.

For a long time, Moroccan directors will have struggling to appropriate the city's image breaking with the original film of 1942. Casablanca will often be considered as an object of desire, of attraction, the city where everything is possible, especially for rural people who come to get lost in its hostile and man-eating streets. It then allows Moroccan directors to establish a diagnosis of the failings of contemporary Moroccan society, while at the same time it is considered the least Moroccan of the cities in the Kingdom.

Let's go together with CitizOn discovering the most beautiful cinemas in the city as well as filming locations and images of Casablanca in local and international cinema.