This paper addresses the work of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi and its part in a long history of exchange between the Maghreb, Europe, and the Americas. Smihi (b. 1945) is a foundational figure in the “New Arab Cinema” of the 1970s. Born in Tangier, he moved to Paris in 1965; attending film school there, he was deeply influenced by seminars with Roland Barthes and other intellectuals. Since his return to Morocco in the early 70s, Smihi has continued to make groundbreaking films and has published three volumes of writing on cinema. None of his films is available in the US and, of his published writing, only a single interview is available in English. Despite this, Smihi’s work has been highly esteemed by Francophone critics and historians of Maghrebian cinema and has recently garnered belated interest within Morocco. Since his first feature (EL CHERGUI, 1975), Smihi experimented with a narrative and visual style that relinquished popular Egyptian models; consequently, his early films were praised overseas but not screened in Morocco. While Smihi’s films may be formally challenging, their failure to circulate extensively within Morocco, he argues, is ultimately due not to their textual complexity but to the gradual devaluation within Arab societies of a discourse of critique, experimentation, and self-transformation. I will argue that Smihi’s intellectual project—critical and creative—constitutes a re-invigoration of discourses of modernity within the Arab world and a re-valuation of the cultural traffic between the Maghreb and non-Arab sites. Turning equally to Arab intellectuals like Taha Hussein, writers like Barthes, and filmmakers like Woody Allen, Smihi is also in dialogue with artists like Chadi Abdel Salam or Tawfik Saleh who also opposed the orthodoxies of the dominant Egyptian film industry. Rejecting explanations of either a hegemonic globalization or a “clash of civilizations” by which Arab and Western cultures are in fundamental opposition, my paper will expose a much more complex traffic between East and West in which Smihi’s work takes shape. Bibliography Armes, Roy. POSTCOLONIAL IMAGES: STUDIES IN NORTH AFRICAN FILM. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Berrah, Mouny et al. “Cinémas du Maghreb.” Special issue. CINEMACTION 14 (1981). Dwyer, Kevin. BEYOND CASABLANCA: M.A. TAZI AND THE ADVENTURE OF MOROCCAN CINEMA. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. Edwards, Brian T. MOROCCO BOUND: DISORIENTING AMERICA’S MAGHREB, FROM CASABLANCA TO THE MARRAKECH EXPRESS. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Smihi, Moumen. ECRIRE SUR LE CINEMA. Paris: Slaïki Frères, 2006.