Abstract

This article analyses the Moroccan film Zanka Contact (Ismaël El Iraki, 2020) as a cinematic device in which art — particularly rock music and bodily performance — operates as a vector of individual emancipation and resistance to dominant social norms. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining film studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of art, we examine how contemporary Moroccan cinema mobilises aesthetic experience to think the subjectivation of marginalised figures. Analysis of the film’s formal choices — narrative fragmentation, soundscape, corporeality — reveals an aesthetics of freedom grounded in generic impurity and symbolic transgression. Zanka Contact thus participates in a broader Maghrebi cinematic turn that reconfigures art not as a contemplative object but as a transformative practice within constrained urban  spaces.