Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub and the Reinvention of Moroccan Film Spectatorship Today in many ways the figurehead of Moroccan cinema, filmmaker Nabil Ayouch made a decisive imprint on the cinema of that country with his first feature film, Mektoub. A box office success, Mektoub was shown to audience acclaim at cinemas throughout Morocco and screened at a number of international film festivals abroad. Yet its influence on Moroccan cinema was soon eclipsed by Ayouch’s second feature, the engaging, internationally acclaimed and distributed Ali Zaoua. Yet despite his more visible, later films, Ayouch’s now neglected first film remains remarkable for the shift it effected in the aesthetics of Moroccan cinema. Alternately thriller, revenge drama, and road movie, Mektoub was the first Moroccan film that successfully took popular western genres and reinvented them as Moroccan, thereby reshaping Moroccan audiences’ expectations of what Moroccan cinema could and should be. This paper explores how Ayouch’s film politicizes the aesthetics of Moroccan cinema. This is not to say that Mektoub is necessarily political in nature. In fact, although it contains visual and narrative cues to very real political histories—the serial rapes leading to the last capital punishment case in Morocco in 1993, the years of lead marked by the imprisonment, torture, and/or disappearing of perceived dissidents, widespread corruption in the police force and government, the drug trade, the urban/rural divide that pitted some regions of the country against the monarchy, and so on—Ayouch’s film is first and foremost an entertainment film. It pits a spoiled, American-educated ophthalmologist against a corrupt police chief who has abducted and ritually raped his wife, as well as against the ring of law-enforcement and government officials who back the police chief and take part in the gang rapes he organizes. Although perhaps far-fetched for audiences abroad, Moroccan audiences were caught up in the action of the film, surmising that the film could not end well. And yet it did, though not in the manner it would have had it been an American film. More important than the plot, however, are Ayouch’s sweeping panoramas of Morocco and constant references to the act of looking and the uses of film. Mektoub, I argue, urges audiences not just to look at Morocco in a new light, but also to reconsider what Moroccan film should look like as well as the purposes it should serve.