Najat Jellab is a Montreal-based filmmaker and producer by way of Casablanca, Morocco. Her filmography weaves the muted romance of suggestion into a social fabric of the characters. Taking friendship as a methodology, her constructed dramas call forth the humour of the everyday, remarking on a version of the world that refuses to be totalized. Jellab approaches scriptwriting as a poly-voice fugue, orchestrating a musical score of individual beings that emerge in a shock of philosophical musing. The ordinary is made strange and pertinent in the staging of situational dreaming. 
Concerned with sociality, Jellab presents a collective experience without being didactic, visualizing an open network of relations in which things usually missed are brought to the fore. It is a project in focus—how to bring about the emergence of what can be missed in memory. Jellab’s practice has expanded to that of galvanizing the voices of others through an infrastructural approach to media production. In founding Victoria Films in 2014, Jellab leads a team in producing films, an online radio station, and a video-streaming service. Grounding this full-bodied approach to the importance of independence and the power embedded in autonomous production.
Hera Chen