Casablanca: City of contrasts and disparities—from economic hub to lieu of crime and disenfranchisement. This paper explores Casablanca women as rendered in four popular films from Morocco: Mustapha Derkaoui’s Casablanca by Night (2003); Farida Benlyazid’s Casablanca, Casablanca (2002); Mohamed Asli’s In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly (2004); Noureddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra (2008). These films render the city of light as darkness, a city of crime and passion, a city to be feared, inhabited by crime lords, prostitutes, the marginalized and fanatics. “I have invented nothing. My film is a mirror of Moroccan society. I show Morocco as it is, not as one would have us believe that it is, explains Noreddine Lakhmari. Violence, social injustice are universal. Let’s stop being hypocrites and admit that we find them here in our own house."* Amidst crime and corruption, fear and longing, women figure as doubly marginalized—prostitutes, beaten wives, divorcees, abandoned—yet also at times as self-directed, conscious manipulators of their marginal positions for their own gain. This paper utilizes the cultural studies tradition in which media products do not exist separately from their origins, the constraints on the production process or the audiences desires to see certain representations on screen. Further, as the late Stuart Hall notes: “Cultural identities are the … unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.”** The underworld is “positioned” as both oppositional and intertwined with the dominant public sphere; the roles and essences of the female bodies are also “positioned” within this underworld. Derkaoui’s Kalthoum uses her marginalized position to maneuver within the underworld to play dark forces against each other to gain funding for sick brother’s operation. Lakhmari’s Adil uses profits from crime to save his mother who is beaten and oppressed by her husband while his partner woos a divorcee who sleeps with him then rejects him, revealing that some marginalized women can seduce for personal pleasure but remain bound by other socio-economic strictures. This paper elaborates how women in four films are represented as simultaneously victims, beneficiaries, and manipulators of the underworld of “the city of light”. *Florence Beaugé, "Casanegra", film-vérité sur Casablanca, dévoile la face sombre du Maroc, Le Monde, 27.01.2009 **Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora". In Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993.