The participation of the Tanger Cinémathèque in the Tirailleurs project stems from a simple intention: to look differently. To look differently at the archives, differently at the images, differently at history, and above all, differently at the people appearing in it, to revisit the narratives, reopen readings, and shift the gaze. This is not about producing a historical discourse or adopting an academic stance. Instead of encountering the history of the Moroccan Tirailleurs as a uniform block, Cinémathèque de Tanger aims to present the soldiers as multiple, singular, shaped by individual and personal stories that can never be reduced to a single official narrative.

The archives we have been able to consult, images or films, come from a colonial apparatus that filmed to document, to propagate power, or to serve a political and military discourse. We present them here not as evidence to be validated, but as materials to be read differently, questioned, and above all contextualized within their temporal space. We invite the audience not only to consume this material, but to examine what it says, as well as what it hides, to imagine the scenes before and after the capturing of these visual media, and the areas that escape the image itself.

The 2008 film J’ai tant aimé (I loved so much ...) by Dalila Ennadre is also shown within the context of the exhibition’s film programme. The documentary details the story of Fadma, who was recruited by the French army as a sex worker to accompany Moroccan soldiers during the Indochina war. As she intimates her thoughts on love and reparation, the screening allows viewers to see how cinema can become a rare space where storytelling shifts from the power of the film-maker to the humanity of the subject. Our approach aims to move away from recurring narratives and create a space that confronts the complexity and diversity of these soldiers’ engagements that were shaped by varied and often intertwined realities, anything but linear or simplistic. Some of the Moroccan Tirailleurs joined the army due to poverty, others saw it as a promise of adventure or movement, some followed family or tribal decisions, while others were swept up without fully understanding the stakes of the situation. There are many others whose motivations are not recorded in any register. We would also like to tell the story of these soldiers through the narratives of their families—spouses, children, and grandchildren—to try to understand, through their accounts, how the wars experienced by their ancestors may have influenced their lives. One example is the interview shown in the exhibition with Fiach Mustapha, son of the former Tirailleur, Fiach Omar.

We uphold here a simple but essential principle: to accept that there are as many stories as there are individuals, that ambivalence is not a weakness of the narrative but its condition, and that the silence of the archives is not a void to be filled with certainties, but a space to open to imagination, nuance, and hypothesis. This exhibition therefore does not claim to rehabilitate or conclude, but rather to unfold, explore, and suggest. Our role is not to assert what these soldiers thought, but to recall that each of them was greater than the image that remains of them. We work at the intersection of archives and imagination, memory and projection, document and possible narrative, in order to convey not a single truth, but the possibility of multiple truths.

Cinémathèque de Tanger