Its proponents, inspired by political and artistic concerns, and similar to Italy's New Realism, France's Nouvelle Vague, and the US independent and underground movements, worked outside of the studio systems of Hollywood and Egypt, where business incentives dictated form and content.
The city, which from 1923 had the status of an "International zone" governed by France, Spain and Great Britain (with the addition of Italy in 1926), was about to undergo a process of restoration to full sovereignty that, after a period of Spanish control from 1940 to 1945 during World War II, culminated in 1956 with the signing of the Tangier Protocol.
Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg lived there and could often be found drinking mint tea and smoking kif (Moroccan marijuana) in the Zocco Chico square.
He was influenced by the seminars of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévy-Strauss at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and particularly by Roland Barthes, with whom he worked on a memoir.
Smihi has cited the cinéma vérité pioneer Jean Rouch and Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, whom he met at the Francophone Film Festival, as being among those who imparted to him a sense of the magic of movies.
It was in Morocco in 1975 that Smihi produced and directed his prize-winning first feature El Chergui (The East Wind), which was highly regarded in Europe and Africa and received enthusiastic reviews in Le Nouvel Observateur, Jeune Afrique, The International Herald Tribune2 and elsewhere.
His second feature, The Tales of the Night, won the Venezia Genti Prize at the Mostra of Venezia in 1985.3 Here, Smihi's filmmaking language is manifest: weaving together while teasing apart the threads of realism, poetry and the principles of "text theory"; a refusal of the structures of "ideological discourse", thus allowing the strength and the independence of the esthetic material to emerge.4 In the 1980s, Smihi began to seek French and international co-productions resulting in French television companies producing a number of his films.
[2] For the past ten years Smihi has been working on an autobiography from which he adapted the screenplays of his last two features, A Muslim Childhood in 2005 (nominated at the Fifth Marrakech International Film Festival) and Of Virgins And Swallows (2008) both about his native Tangier.