Adventures at the Edge of the Sahara
By Lexi Friedman
Today we visited the Atlas Mountains and went to Ait Ben Haddou, a UNESCO heritage site right next to the Sahara Desert, ate lunch with a family in the Atlas Mountains, and visited the Atlas Studios where many historical films are shot.
Ait Ben Haddou was an amazing site in the desert, and we walked up to a castle right at the top of the site. We learned that seven of the more wealthy families still lived in the castle, in different Kasbah, which are turrets in the castle big enough for a family to live in. The walk up to the castle was very hot, but once we got there it was so windy that you couldn’t feel the heat as badly.
The top of Ait Ben Haddou. Photographs by Lexi Friedman.
We ate lunch with a family in the Atlas Mountains, which was amazing, and then we went to Atlas Studios, a film production site where they have filmed hundreds of historical films. We saw a recreation of a Chinese temple from the Himalayas, a Greek and Roman section, where parts of the “Hercules” and “Gladiator” movies were filmed, an Egyptian section where “Cleopatra” was filmed, and an Afghanistan section. Our guide explained that for a lot of companies, filming in Morocco is ideal, because there is good weather to shoot any time of the year, there is lots of natural light from the sun and a clear sky to superimpose different kinds of weather onto, like rain, clouds, or storms, which is a good way to have variety in weather without sacrificing light. It is also much cheaper to film in Morocco than the US, and it is easy to get authorization to shoot there, especially as so many companies have shot there already. Filming in the Atlas Mountains also has the advantage of many different surrounding environments that can be used for filming very close to each other. There are also a lot of trained actors who live and work in Morocco who are easy to hire if you are filming at Atlas Studios. Our guide was a cinematographer who has worked on 40 movies, and he had us reenact scenes from movies and used it to show us cinematography tricks! He also told us a lot about CGI and how it is used in the movie making process.
Lunch with an Amazigh family (left) and fun at Atlas Studios (right).
Our ride back to Marrakesh was almost four hours, but it was made longer because we got stopped by the police three times on the way back. Still, we made it back in time for dinner, even if it was a little late!