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A Thousand and One Berber Nights

In the late 1950s Hassan Ouakrim was a young dancer and actor in Morocco. Little did he know that he would soon become the protegé of La Mama Theatre founder Ellen Stewart, performing across America, forming friendships with the likes of jazz virtuosos Ornette Coleman and Randy Weston, and becoming a pioneer in spreading Berber dance and music in North America.

  • Hisham Aïdi
    Director
    Malcolm X and the Sudanese (producer)
  • Hisham Aïdi
    Writer
    Malcolm X and the Sudanese
  • Sophie Schrago
    Producer
    Malcolm X and the Sudanese
  • Chithra Jeyaram
    Director of Photography
    Foreign Puzzle, Our Daughters
  • Chithra Jeyaram
    Editor
    Foreign Puzzle, Our Daughters
  • Lauren Wimbush
    Archival Producer
    Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Through the Fire: the Legacy of Barack Obama
  • Henry Sims
    Sound Mixer
    Hors Saison, Hide, Swing Ride, A Thousand Fires
  • Brittany Douziech
    Music Supervisor
    Storming Ceasars Palace, Tuning René Marie, Body Parts, Life & Beth
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Feature
  • Runtime:
    53 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 1, 2023
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    Arabic, English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Hisham Aïdi

Hisham Aidi is a Moroccan-American academic and music journalist who has recently taken to documentary filmmaking.
He is author most recently of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon 2014). As a cultural reporter, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation and The New Yorker. Aidi is the recipient of the Carnegie Scholar Award (2008), the American Book Award (2015), the Hip Hop Scholar Award (2015) and the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship (2020). "A Thousand and One Berber Nights" is his first feature film.

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Director Statement

I am Moroccan American. My family is from the Rif region in Northern Morocco, where the Berber/Tarifit language is spoken. I have long wanted to bring attention to Berber/Amazigh culture and history in America. The Amazigh American community has grown rapidly since the mid-1990s. I have long wanted to highlight the rich cultural encounters that have occurred between North African migrants, native Americans and African Americans in the US.

I arrived in America as a sixteen year old. I have spent the past thirty years based in Harlem, writing about and working with African American, African and Hispanic organizations. I had long heard of Hassan, and when I met him in New York as a student, I was struck by his flamboyance, his cosmopolitanism and his corpus of work. Not only has he trained dozens of dancers and musicians (at his apartment, aka "Arabian Nights Studio"), and appeared in countless Off-Broadway plays, video clips and commercials but he is close friends with renowned jazz artists and American politicians. In his 60-year career, Ouakrim has brought the riches of Berber culture to America and the beauty of African American culture to North Africa. His story is critically important, as it is a story of Sufism and Saharan music in America, and the emergence of a little-known community through art and culture. Finally it is a tale of how art can allow immigrants to integrate into the American mainstream.

The film uses archival footage to evoke Ouakrim's trajectory from a village in the Atlas mountains in colonial-era Morocco, to the rowdy East Village of the 1970s where he hosted Oriental galas and dance workshops. "A Thousand and One Berber Nights" is a musical road movie that offers a visually-stunning, musically-layered story. I hope viewers will be moved and amused by Ouakrim's journey, his spiritual and cultural fluidity, his casual belief in the paranormal, and his affinity for the cultures of the East Village and Harlem.