I loved being in this city. The challenge here was to somehow capture its vibrancy, which was practically impossible. The problem is that the atmosphere is built by the smells, the sounds and the chaos that surrounds the medina. This is incredibly difficult to capture and my only solution was to include some footage of the souk, filmed at chest height. I believe that this, combined with the establishing shot from the restaurant, was the only way that I could represent the colours, sounds and activity of the city.
It was a diffcult sequence to cut for the film, as I ultimately used the restaurant as an oportunity to establish our interactions with one another as a group, and therefore the footage of us experiencing the town is marginalised in an attempt to drive characterisation further. It was ultimately a very hard set of decisions to make in the edit, and I tried to balance it with far more footage of the souk in Fez, which appears later in the film.
