Résumé

This article analyzes representations of school in Moroccan cinema, examining how films construct educational imaginaries in a society shaped by historical, cultural, and postcolonial tensions. Drawing on a corpus of five Moroccan films, Notre amie l’école (Larbi Benchekroun, 1956), Assamt (Lahcen Zinoun, 2001), La Main gauche (Fadil Chouika, 2007), Amal (Ali Benkirane, 2004), and School of Hope (Mohamed El Aboudi, 2020), the study develops a dual thematic and formal inquiry. It investigates what these films reveal about school as a social institution and how cinematographic choices such as framing, lighting, the use of space, and the representation of bodies actively participate in the production of meaning. The analysis is grounded in the concept of the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo 2000) and in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s notion of double belonging, which illuminates the cultural contradictions underlying Moroccan educational representations. The article distinguishes between two complementary systems of representation: fiction films condense and symbolize educational tensions through individual trajectories, whereas documentary cinema anchors these issues in the observation of social reality. Comparisons with non-Moroccan films are introduced as critical counterpoints rather than normative 
models in order to highlight the specificity of 
the Moroccan postcolonial context. The article 
argues that Moroccan cinema constructs, from independence to the present, a cartography of contradictions between the emancipatory promise of school and the mechanisms of exclusion it perpetuates, contradictions that become visible through formal choices themselves: lighting, framing, the treatment of bodies, and the organization of space.