Safi – The Casablanca Arab Film Festival is back for a , which runs from July 17 to 24, after an earlier postponement.

Founded in 2018, it was the first festival of its kind in Morocco. It set out to build a local audience for Arab film, especially among the young.

Each edition screens more than 40 features, documentaries and shorts from across the Arab world. Public institutions have backed it, with the city of Casablanca sponsoring its most recent edition.

Competition sits at the heart of the week. The festival stages two competitions, one for feature-length films and one for shorts, each judged by a panel of Arab filmmakers. Every selected film premieres in Morocco at the festival.

The feature jury hands out the Casablanca Grand Prize, a Special Jury Prize, and awards for directing, screenplay and acting. The short-film jury gives its own Grand Prize, best director and best screenplay.

Around the screenings, the festival holds workshops in screenwriting, production and acting, and it also runs masterclasses and hosts talks with visiting filmmakers.

Ahead of the edition, the festival unveiled the poster, a first look at this year’s edition. It shows the coast at night, a lighthouse over the Atlantic, its beam sweeping down to form the number seven.

Stars of previous editions

Six editions in, the festival has grown into a fixture on Morocco’s film calendar, and it has honored some of Arab cinema’s best-known names alongside the competition.

Last year’s edition put the Egyptian actor Ahmed Helmy and the Moroccan singer and actor Younes Megri in the spotlight. On the awards side, the Palestinian director Leila Abbas took the Grand Prize for “Thank You for Banking With Us,” and the film’s Clara Khoury was named best actress. The Tunisian actor Mohamed Mrad won best actor for “Jad.”

A year before that, the honors crossed more of the map, reaching the Egyptian screen veteran Hussein Fahmy, who chairs the Cairo film festival, the Syrian actor and director Ayman Zeidan, and the Moroccan stars Jalila Talemsi and Mohamed El Khalfi. Zeidan also chaired one of the juries.

For eight days this July, Casablanca hands its summer over to the screen.