Being on a film jury for the first time is a strange experience. In my case, this begins from a large five-star hotel room with a view of the curved beach that receives the Atlantic, and behind it the hill that commands the bay. On the hill are massively shaved words in Arabic: Allah, al Watan, al Malik — god, the nation, the king.

Luckily, the king is apparently a cool guy in his forties who wants to lead Morocco into the depths of the 21st century while navigating around the many traps facing Islamic nations. The words, lit up at night, preside over a sprawl of hotels and restaurants that make up Agadir’s main industry, which is tourism. The town, which was more or less completely destroyed in an earthquake in the Eighties, has little of the kasbah-charm of other Moroccan cities, but it efficiently serves a whole host of tourists, who come craving their dose of sun, sand, sea, beer and night-clubbing. The documentary films we evaluate are viewed in a theatre that reminds me of the Calcutta Information Centre.

After four days of watching documentaries, we, the jury, sit down for our penultimate discussion over dinner at a nondescript Italian restaurant. The team is chaired by a doyenne of Moroccan documentary and consists of a heavily articulated but lightly structured battleship of French cinema-theory, a young French filmmaker who’s based in Egypt, an African film-publicist who works out of Paris, and myself. The talk we have is unsurprisingly amicable and we agree quickly on a short-list. The next morning, we sit next to the plush swimming area of the hotel and have an even quicker discussion to decide the final three films, two for the awards and one to which we want to give a special mention. We don’t know who will receive the Public Jury’s Prize, but it later turns out to be the one film from Calcutta that’s in competition which, of course, makes me very happy, because it’s a film I quite like.

Once the hard work is done, I head off for the souk with the African publicist, who I think of as ‘the Big Man’, because he is, to put it in the most understated terms, a big-built man. We take one of the small, red, Peugeot taxis and wind away from the beach-front and into the town proper. Away from the tourism architecture, the buildings and roads look like they could be from anywhere semi-desertish — Marseilles, Ahmedabad, Damsacus. The ‘souk’, once we pass through one of the arches that make up the gates, reminds me of nothing more than New Market: rows and grids of shops, all lit by tube-lights, all trying their best to make a buck or two. Very quickly, me and the Big Man are hooked by a licensed tout who speaks both English and French. Big Man wants to buy a djellabba, one of those long Arab/African gowns that make for extremely comfortable attire in these parts; I just want to look.

“Come, come, I take you! I take you what you want!”

Our guide is a man in his mid-fifties, with an ID-card hanging from his neck. He quickly embroils the Big Man in a shop where people start draping him in xxl-size tents with weaves of all sorts. Then the tout tries to figure me out.

“You want medicine?”

“What kind of medicine?”

“All kinds, what you want! Also natural Viagra. Moroccan, natural viagra. Very good for wife!”

“Okay,” I say, though I’m not quite sure why.

The tout tries to take me to the shop, but I’m not about to leave without my large bodyguard.

“Big Man!” I call out, “Come! They have Moroccan natural Viagra!”

The Big Man turns, still in the slightly tight xxxl djellabba he’s trying on. “Okay, where? I don’t need Viagra but they may have other medicine also, I’m very interested.” He comes with me, wearing his un-purchased garment.

Indeed the shop has medicines. And spices. The owner is solicitous about our health and comfort, he quickly shows us many photos of women, mostly European, who have come back and kissed him for rejuvenating their boyfriends, husbands and partners.

“So….” — there is a whole array of spices and jadi-buti ranged on shelves and tables and the man starts to list them for us: “This is for sinus, this, normal cold, this, constipation, this, diabetes, this….”

The Big Man and I stop him. We each buy some of the powders, just to try. The big guy buys diabetes pellets for his brother and I acquire some sex-powder to try out on my friends and some roots to treat varicose veins.

We go back to the clothes stall and we ask the price for the djellabba.

“Oh,” says the tout, “a million dollars!”

“What?”

“Not much, not much, he will tell you!” The shop-owner points to an assistant who has a large calculator handy. The Big Man’s gowns come to 1800 dirhams, the one piece of clothing I want comes to 650 dirhams. The Big Man looks upset, I start to laugh. We both head for the exit.

“Hey! What happened?”

“Too much. Cannot pay so much.”

“This is Morocco!” The tout is apoplectic: “Morocco, flexible pricing! Tell me how much, how much?”

We tell him. He tells the shop-owner, who looks at the assistant with the calculator. Robbery is taking place, but they can do nothing to stop it.

“Okay, give me the money!”

Big Man gives him 800 dirhams, a hoist down from the 1800, I shell out 200 for the 650 that were demanded. I have the feeling we could have gone down even more, but this is not important. We get our stuff and leave. As we climb into the taxi I remind myself that this is where the desert starts, the tract of sand and culture which ends in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

At the end-of-festival dinner, a man to whom our jury didn’t award a prize is unhappy.

“I can’t believe the films that won had my level of craftsmanship,” he says to me.

“Did you see any of the films we awarded?” I ask him.

“No. But I can’t believe they could have had the level of craftsmanship I had in my film.”

“Believe me, they did,” I say quite sharply.

“Well… it doesn’t matter. They can’t understand the levels of our culture. How can I explain the levels of my film to them? There’s no way they can understand.”

Even though I’ve suddenly become a “they”, I point out to him that I, too, was on the jury, hopefully understanding both cine-craftsmaship and culture. I’m on the verge of getting angry, but then I remember the tout, from the souk that begins a few thousand miles from the souk which I grew up visiting, I think: flexible Moroccan pricing, flexible Calcutta temper. I vaguely considered putting the sex-powder into this film-maker’s dinner-plate, just to see what happens, but I don’t — the powder is back in my nice hotel room and, anyway, it would be wasted on this man who’s about to go back to his hotel and sleep, cursing his greatly superior craftsmanship and his four-thousand-year-old culture.