Safi – The Nuit Blanche of Cinema and Democracy will take place in Rabat on July 10, marking its 14th edition with a night of open-air screenings on the esplanade of the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco.

The name is French for a sleepless night, and the program takes it literally. Screenings will run from nightfall until past 4 a.m., free and open to all.

Behind the event stands the Association of Mediterranean Meetings of Cinema and Human Rights, a Rabat-based group founded in 2010 to promote human rights culture through film. Every edition of its all-nighter carries a theme, and democracy takes the stage this year after the 2025 night explored citizenship.

The Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication, the Moroccan Cinematographic Center, and UN Women are among this edition’s partners.

The theme will get its first airing at 4:30 p.m., when a debate on rethinking democracy in a changing world opens the program at the library’s auditorium. Fadoua Maroub will moderate the exchange between Ali Bouabid, Nadia Hachimi Alaoui, Noureddin Qadiri Boutchich, and Sofia Lahrari.

As night falls, the celebration will move outside for the awards ceremony of “Orangez le Cinéma” (Orange the Cinema), the national student short-film competition against gender-based violence in cinema. From 8:30 p.m., the winning films will premiere on the esplanade, and their directors will be there to meet the audience.

The main program will open at 9:10 p.m. with “No Other Land,” winner of the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, and Hamdan Ballal filmed Palestinian communities facing the loss of their land, and their documentary will set the tone for what follows.

From there, the films will run nearly back to back. Dominique Caubet’s “Dima Punk” will pick up the thread at 10:50 p.m. with Stof, a Moroccan punk who turns his music into an act of resistance.

At 12:05 a.m., Raoul Peck will keep the questions coming with “Orwell: 2+2=5,” a look at George Orwell’s ideas in the age of disinformation. Peck earned an Oscar nomination for “I Am Not Your Negro.”

The small hours will reward those who stay. “Le Goût de la politique” (The Taste of Politics), by Juan Gordillo Hidalgo and Sandrine Mercier, will look inside the daily machinery of political life at 2:20 a.m.

At 3:55 a.m., Issam-Eddine Marhouj’s “Check Mate” will bring a drama about personal courage when the rules of the game are rigged.

The night will close at 4:10 a.m. with Hind Meddeb’s “Sudan, Remember Us,” in which young Sudanese artists hold on to their dreams of freedom through revolution and war.

The campaign behind the orange

The competition grew out of a campaign launched in November 2025 at the Moroccan Cinematheque in Rabat, the first national drive of its kind in the country’s film sector. Its name echoes the United Nations’ 16 Days of Activism, which turns the world orange each year for the same cause.

Students at Moroccan universities, institutes, and film schools were invited to submit shorts of up to ten minutes, in any genre from documentary to animation. The strongest entries will meet their first audience under an open sky.

Sixteen years of cinema and rights

The all-nighter is the flagship of a year-round calendar. Since 2010, the association has paired the screen with human rights through themed screenings, master classes, and film mornings for children, and the Nuit Blanche condenses that work into one open-air marathon.

From the first reel after sunset to the last at dawn, Rabat will spend one night with its eyes wide open.