Morocco is not an emerging shooting territory. The Centre cinématographique marocain (CCM) was created in 1944, and the country has since built a complete chain: approved production companies, trained technicians, working studios, and a single point of entry for authorisations. What has changed in recent years is the volume.
In 2025, the CCM recorded 48 foreign film and television shoots, representing more than 1.16 billion dirhams. Across all formats, foreign spend exceeds 1.21 billion dirhams, against 497 million in 2017. This guide sets out what a foreign production has to weigh up before committing to a shoot, and points to the detail of each stage.
What brings productions in
Three elements combine, and none of them is enough on its own.
- A reimbursement of 30% of eligible expenditure, with no cap since the reform of 28 March 2022.
- A density of locations that is rare within a single day's drive: desert, mountain, medina, Atlantic coast, colonial architecture.
- A local technical ecosystem, sustained in part by domestic production, 596.48 million dirhams in 2025, and therefore available outside the peaks of international shooting.
The third point is the least visible from abroad and the most decisive in practice. A territory that has only landscapes forces you to import the entire crew; a territory that has crews lets you hire on the ground and bring down the real cost of the shooting schedule.
The support scheme in one page
The Moroccan mechanism is a reimbursement paid after the fact, not a tax credit. Three conditions open the right to support, and they can be checked as soon as the shooting schedule exists.
| Condition | Threshold |
|---|---|
| Minimum spend in Morocco | 10 million dirhams excluding tax |
| Minimum shooting duration | 18 days, set construction included |
| Filing entity | Moroccan production company approved by the CCM |
The scheme covers feature-length fiction films and documentaries, television fiction series, TV movies, docufiction and fiction works intended for the internet. It excludes animation, short films, promotional films, music videos, reality TV and recordings of live performances.
The chain of authorisations
A foreign production does not file a shooting authorisation application in its own name. The authorisation is only issued to companies holding the operating licence (autorisation d'exercice) and the production approval (agrément de production) issued by the CCM, which means a Moroccan company. The international production accredits it to execute the shoot on its behalf.
In practice, the Moroccan partner assembles and files the application on the CCM's digital platform: signed form, crew members' contracts, workplace accident insurance, public liability insurance, provisional schedule, and the documents specific to the format being shot.
The locations and their geography
Morocco's asset is not one location in particular but their concentration. Ouarzazate holds the studios and access to the desert; the High Atlas offers mountain and, in season, snow; Marrakech, Fez and Tetouan supply the medinas; Casablanca urban and industrial architecture; Essaouira and the Atlantic coast the ocean; the Saharan south the wide-open spaces.
That proximity has a direct effect on the shooting schedule: a single base camp can serve several visual worlds, which cuts the number of travel days between locations, often the heaviest hidden line on an exterior shoot.
Who shoots in Morocco
The CCM's 2025 report gives the measure of the projects hosted and of their local spend.
| Production | Spend in Morocco |
|---|---|
| The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan) | 252 million dirhams |
| American series, working title “UNT Merc” | 234.3 million dirhams |
| The Terminal List, season 2 | 156.9 million dirhams |
| The Agency, season 2 | 113.9 million dirhams |
| Here Comes the Flood (Fernando Meirelles) | 42.7 million dirhams |
The breakdown by format is instructive: television series alone accounted for more than 705.5 million dirhams of foreign spend in 2025, ahead of feature films at close to 421.8 million. Morocco is no longer only a territory for big films, it has become a territory for series, a format that comes back, season after season, to the same locations and with the same crews.
Advertising forms a distinct and substantial flow: 116 commercial shoots were authorised in 2025. Those projects do not fall under the support scheme, which excludes the format, but they keep crews and rental houses in work all year round.
Planning around the timeline
The support scheme imposes deadlines of its own: a response from the CCM within 30 days, a 5% guarantee to be paid within 30 days of the approval, shooting to start within 6 months, production to be completed within 12 months of the first day of shooting, the accounting file to be filed within 3 months, reimbursement within a maximum of 180 days.
A production that decides late to apply for support ends up building its shooting schedule around a clock that is already running. The trade-off is made in development, not in prep.
Going further
Each stage summarised here has its own article: the cash rebate and its expenditure base, the shooting authorisation procedure, and the exact role of the Moroccan production partner, the decision that conditions all the others.
