Screening

Ziyara, Simone Bitton

An invitation from Camille Lévy Sarfati, resident 2025-2026

14.01.2026

Artist
Simone Bitton

Curator
Camille Lévy Sarfati

This screening, organized in conjunction with the Lieux Saints Partagés exhibition at Villa Médicis, offers an intimate dive into Morocco’s ziyara tradition, where director Simone Bitton explores the country’s Jewish roots through the Muslim guardians of its memory.

Documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton returns with her most personal film to date. In it, she embarks on a cinematic pilgrimage to her native Morocco, exploring her Jewish roots through the eyes of Muslims who still preserve the country’s Jewish memory, particularly around the tradition of the “ziyara”.

In the arid landscapes of rural Morocco, young people have often never come into contact with Jews, but their presence remains in the symbols, shrines, synagogues and cemeteries maintained by Muslims who see them as a timeless spiritual link.

Simone Bitton investigates this tradition shared by Muslims and Jews: the ziyara, a pilgrimage to the tombs of saints, a time for prayer, communion with nature and encounters. By revisiting this practice, she reinterprets its identity without nostalgia, and recounts the shared history of the two communities.

Through intimate interviews with elderly witnesses and a new generation of Moroccans, Bitton reveals personal narratives imbued with dignity and hope, told by modest but essential players in the process of remembering and living together.

Simone Bitton

Simone Bitton, born in Morocco in 1955, studied cinema in France, graduating from IDHEC in 1980. A Franco-Moroccan, she divides her time between Rabat and Paris. She has made two feature-length documentaries, WALL (2004) and RACHEL (2009), which have been released in France and a dozen other countries.

Prior to this, she produced over fifteen documentaries for television. From archive montage to cinematic meditation, from personal quest to portraits of writers and musicians, her work bears witness to a constant commitment: to shed light on current affairs, history and cultures in North Africa and the Middle East with rigor, artistic rigor and a deeply personal point of view.

Since 2014, she has taught as an associate professor in the film studies department at Université Paris 8 and...

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curating

Camille Lévy Sarfati

Camille Lévy Sarfati is a curator and author, based in Tunis. Her research concerns the artistic practices of resistance and survivance of the Afro-Asian continents and their diasporas. She is currently working on directing a film about the experience of return, interrogating the (ethno)nationalist narratives linked to the Jewish history of Tunisia. Formerly director of 32bis in Tunis, she has worked with Kadist, Villa Medici, the Palais des Papes, and Selebe Yoon. Her recent projects include the first monographic exhibition of Miss.Tic (in Avignon) and collaborations with Thania Petersen, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Ismaïl Bahri, and Emné Nasereddine. She is the co-founder of the Tunisian collective Nessij.

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