Once ... Agadir
1971 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Jacques Bensimon
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An expatriate Moroccan filmmaker memorializes Agadir, the city devastated by a 1960 earthquake in which he lost family and friends, blending reality and allegorical fantasy to revisit the past he left for North America.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1971 essay film that treats trauma and exile as material for formal play rather than catharsis—Bensimon refuses the expected emotional payoff and instead keeps us suspended between document and fever dream, which is exactly the kind of perverse restraint most people will call self-indulgent.
Bensimon situates this film firmly within the essay-documentary lineage of the NFB's experimental wing, where personal testimony and structural ambition fuse; the measured interweaving of devastation, memory, and allegory demonstrates a filmmaker conscious of cinema's capacity to hold contradictions without resolving them.
The decision to blur Agadir's ruin with invented imagery—letting reality and fantasy occupy the same frame without clarification—does the heavy lifting; it's a small formal choice that transforms what could be a straightforward memorial into something that actually captures how fractured memory and grief refuse neat documentary shape.