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ABAZA, RUSHDI (1927–1980)

A muscular Italian Egyptian actor famed during the 1950s and 1960s as both the romantic lead and tough guy, Abaza was born into a wealthy family and was fluent in five languages. Although he had no prior experience in the theater, he was keen to act in cinema; his first small role was in the film The Little Millionairess (Kamal Karim, 1948). In 1950, he attempted to break into the Italian film industry but, meeting with no success, returned to Egypt to play several minor roles. Many saw him as having the potential to reach international fame (comparable to that achieved by Omar Sharif) because he played small roles in The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) and In the Valley of the Kings (Robert Pirosh, 1954). With slicked-back hair and a trimmed moustache, Abaza’s suave appearance could easily become disheveled and—shirt off—raunchy during the course of a film. In The Road (Hossam Eddin Mostafa, 1966), Abaza’s role as Saber is split according to his relationship with two very different women—as played by Souad Hosni and Shadia.

Under the direction of Ezzedine Zulficar, Rushdi starred in some of his most notable roles, including Road of Hope (1957) and A Woman on the Road (1958). Typical for the industry, these films set the tone for Abaza’s subsequent performances. He was often cast as the sleazy individual with a good heart—and a tendency to drink, gamble, and engage in illicit love affairs. He played the role of a gangster in The Second Man (Zulficar, 1959), starring Samia Gamal and Sabah, and a strong and canny sailor in Struggle on the Nile (Atef Salem, 1959), alongside Hind Rustom and Omar Sharif, while in A Man in Our House (Henri Barakat, 1961), he plays the opportunistic cousin who willingly exploits the situation. In Lost Love (Barakat, 1970), Abaza’s character cheats on his wife (Zubeida Tharwat) with her best friend (Hosni). Abaza also starred in comedies where, in contrast, he plays a hapless victim of the canny ploys of a witty and relentless female—most memorably in Too Young for Love (Niazi Mustafa, 1966), opposite Hosni. In The Little Witch (Mustafa, 1963), he is tormented, also by Hosni, who mistakes him for her estranged father, moves into his house, and disrupts his bachelor lifestyle, while in Wife Number 13 (Fatin Abdel-Wahab, 1962), his bride (Shadia) refuses to consummate their relationship after she discovers that he is a serial romantic who quickly loses interest after marriage. Similarly, in Beware of Eve (Abdel-Wahab, 1962), he plays a veterinary doctor who ultimately tames an ill-tempered shrew (Loubna Abdel Aziz). Abaza married actresses Sabah, Tahiyya Carioca, and Samia Gamal and continued to act until he fell ill and died before completing his role in the 1982 film The Strong Men (Ashraf Fahmy).

ABBASS, HIAM (1960–)

An increasingly visible figure in contemporary world cinema, Palestinian actress Abbass has appeared in several landmark Middle Eastern films. The most recent of these is Amreeka (Cherien Dabis, 2009), arguably the first Palestinian–American feature, in which she plays a sharp-tongued immigrant to the United States from the Occupied Palestinian Territories—a role that resituates but reprises her more militant role as a beur organizer in Living in Paradise (Bourlem Guerdjou, 1998). Abbass’s star persona is one of cool, often enigmatic introspection coupled with intelligent, principled resistance, characteristics that have led to her successful casting in Palestinian as well as Israeli films, notably Haifa (Rashid Masharawi, 1996), The Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis, 2004), Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005), Free Zone (Amos Gitai, 2005), Disengagement (Gitai, 2007), and Lemon Tree (Riklis, 2008), for which she won the Best Actress award from the Israeli Film Academy. Born in Nazareth and raised as a traditional Muslim, Abbass has also appeared in numerous international coproductions, including Ali, Rabia and the Others (Ahmed Boulane, 2000), Satin Rouge (Raja Amari, 2002), and Gate of the Sun (Yousry Nasrallah, 2003). In 2010, she appeared in Miral, American Jewish painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s melodramatic feature about a Jerusalem boarding school for orphaned Palestinian girls, widely viewed as an instance of hasbara; and in 2013, she costarred alongside Nadine Labaki in Leïla Marrakchi’s Rock the Casbah, set at a funeral at which the deceased (Omar Sharif) appears onscreen as an invisible witness to his family’s strained interactions.

ABDEL SAYED, DAOUD (1946–)

An Egyptian director who graduated from the Cairo Higher Cinema Institute in 1968 and worked as assistant director to Kamal El-Sheikh and Youssef Chahine, Daoud Abdel Sayed later became closely associated with the New Realist movement of the 1980s and 1990s. His first feature, The Vagabonds (1983), tells the story of two tramps who become rich drug dealers and lose their friendship because of their greed. In Kit Kat (1991), the title referring to a popular district in north Cairo, the main protagonist is a blind man, Sheikh Hosni (Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz), who spends most of his evenings playing the lute, singing, and smoking hash with his friends. His son, finding little future in Egypt, sets his hopes on traveling abroad to the Persian/Arabian Gulf—only to discover that the money he needs has been squandered by his father. Abdel Sayed’s protagonists have frequently been contradictory in their behavior, and his films often present a deep exploration of the complexities of his characters, rarely simplifying issues of motivation or morality. In Land of Fear (2000), we see a mainstream-looking film packed with action and romance. Yet within the somewhat typical narrative (a policeman goes undercover in order to infiltrate drug rings), we witness the existential conflict of a hero (Ahmed Zaki) plagued with solitude and uncertainty. The voice-over narration that punctuates the film recurs with a more satirical tone in A Citizen, a Detective, and a Thief (2001), starring Khaled Abu Naga, Hend Sabri, and popular singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim. The citizen character (Abu Naga) is a Westernized, liberal-elite author whose harmonious life is disrupted by the theft of his car—a random event that brings him into contact with a domestic servant (Sabri). The series of events that follow are as bizarre as they are unlikely—with Abdel Sayed maintaining an in-depth analysis of his characters, cross-class relations, and assumptions regarding high/low culture. A focus on moral corruption manifests the director’s ongoing concern with an issue considered crucial by the New Realist filmmakers during the 1980s, evident in Messages from the Sea (2010), a story of exile and return set in Alexandria, and Out of the Ordinary (2014), albeit a marked departure from realist aesthetics.

ABDEL WAHAB, MOHAMED (1907–1991)

A highly inventive, extremely prolific, and immensely popular composer, musician, and singer, Abdel Wahab considerably expanded and developed Arabic music, adding Western rhythms and new instrumentation, and—partly at the suggestion of Mohammad Karim, who directed him in seven feature films—devising shorter variations of traditional forms. Born in Cairo, Abdel Wahab began recording music at the age of 13 and was already popular throughout the Arab world from radio broadcasts by the time he began a collaboration with Karim in a series of musicals, beginning with The White Rose (1934) and ending with I’m No Angel (1947). After this, he made a cameo performance in Flirtation of Girls (Anwar Wagdi, 1949), playing himself, performing one of his songs, and conducting a vast orchestra in friend Yussuf Wahbi’s house in the middle of the night at the climax of the film. Giving up cinema in the 1950s, he continued his singing in the 1960s and his composing long after—reflected in his broadly modernist experimentation with musical forms. In 1964, he wrote the first of several songs for his longtime rival at the pinnacle of Egyptian music, marking the first time that the much more traditionally minded Umm Kulthum is accompanied by an electric guitar. The popularity of these two figures, in particular, was a factor in establishing the primacy of Egyptian sound cinema in the Arab world.

ABDEL-AZIZ, MAHMOUD (1946–2016)

After receiving a master’s degree in agriculture from the University of Alexandria, Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz began his career during the late 1980s as an actor in Egyptian television. Although cast in serious films such as Shafika and Metwally (Ali Badrakhan, 1978) and Hunger (1986), he also often played comic roles in films that touched on social issues. Dimwitted, earnest, and endearing, he is the half-wit in The Palm Agency (Hossam Eddin Mostafa, 1982)—named after a district in Cairo—while The Flat Is the Wife’s Legal Right (Omar Abdel-Aziz, 1985) features a classic scene in which Abdel-Aziz sits on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, legs crossed, elbow deep in a washing pail, singing loudly in an attempt to aggravate his ex-wife and her mother. In Beast Race (Ali Abdel-Khaliq, 1987), he agrees to a lobotomy, then regrets his decision and offers his riches for the chance to reverse the procedure before going mad with despair at the loss of his “cantaloupe” (the area of his brain that represents his potency).

Abdel-Aziz worked with a number of New Realist directors and was quickly associated with their movement. He starred in Ra’fat El-Mihi’s The Gentleman (1987), Fish, Milk, and Tamarind (1988), and Dear Ladies (1990), in which he is married to four career-oriented women simultaneously and ends up pregnant. However, he is best known for his role as Sheikh Hosni in Kit Kat (Daoud Abdel Sayed, 1991), in which he plays a blind man who lives with his mother and son. He also costarred with actresses Naglaa Fathi (Excuse Me, It’s the Law [Inas al-Deghidi, 1985]), Mervat Amin (The World on the Wings of a Dove [Atef El-Tayeb, 1989]), Abla Kamel (Ika’s Law [Ashraf Fahmy, 1991]), and Ilham Shahine (Pleasure Market [Samir Seif, 1999]). After a period of absence, he featured alongside a younger generation of actors in The Magician (Radwan El-Kashef, 2002). He played a single father who struggles to preserve his daughter’s virginity in The Baby Doll Night (Adel Adib, 2008) and appeared as the gang leader in Ibrahim Abyad (Marwan Hamed, 2009). Abdel-Aziz continued to act in both television and cinema up until his death.

ABDEL-SALAM, SHADI (CHADI) (1930–1986)

A committed nationalist and liberal of the Nasserist era, Abdel-Salam, born in Alexandria, trained as an architect and worked as a set and costume designer with Egyptian directors such as Youssef Chahine, Salah Abu Seif, and Henri Barakat, as well as with Joseph Mankiewicz on Cleopatra (1963), Jerzy Kawalerowicz on the Polish Pharoa (1966), and Roberto Rossellini on the television series Mankind’s Fight for Survival (1967). In 1968, he became head of the Unit for Experimental Cinema, in which directors were given more freedom of expression, and for which he directed two documentaries: Horizons (1972), about the arts in modern Egypt, and The Armies of the Sun (1975), on the 1973 war with Israel.

Given his background in architecture, his experience in costume and set design, and his knowledge of history and philosophy, Abdel-Salam manifested his desire to rekindle the splendor of ancient Egypt, rejecting both socialist pan-Arabism and Islamism—the two solutions offered for the salvation of Egypt. Abdel-Salam’s work reveals a rigorous attempt to draw on and understand ancient Egypt and its significance within contemporary Egyptian society, most apparent in his only feature, The Night of Counting the Years (1968), also known as The Mummy. His other films, including the fictional short based on an ancient papyrus The Complaints of the Eloquent Peasant (1970), and his unfinished project, Akhenaton, about the ancient king who sought to unify Egypt, highlight his conviction that this rich past is one that remains relevant to Egyptians today. He also directed three nonfiction shorts on the subject of ancient Egypt: Tut Ankh-Amon’s Chair (1983), The Pyramids and Their Antecedents (1984), and Ramses II (1986).

ABDEL-WAHAB, FATIN (1913–1972)

Born in Dumyat, Abdel-Wahab became Egypt’s most important comedy director during the 1950s and 1960s, and the vast majority of his films belong to that genre. He worked closely with Ismail Yasin following the success of their collaboration in Miss Hanafi (1954), in which Yasin becomes a woman and marries a butcher; the collaboration continued with a series of films with “Ismail Yasin” in the title, beginning with Ismail Yasin in the Army (1955). The fact that Abdel-Wahab graduated from military college in 1939 and continued to work in the armed forces until 1954 indicates that his experience fed much of the content of his early films. Their plots frequently revolve around the unlucky Yasin, who finds himself unable to meet the physical demands of army training or is diminished by a stronger or richer adversary. Typical of the genre, following a series of adventures, justice is restored.

Through his comedies, Abdel-Wahab explored a number of significant social issues in Egypt—in particular, class differences and the role of women. The social aspect of his films came to be emphasized during the 1960s, when he made films such as Oh Eve (1962) and Bride of the Nile (1963), both starring Rushdi Abaza and Loubna Abdel Aziz. In My Wife the General Manager (1966), Abdel-Wahab explores the shifting role of women in a story about a couple whose married life is dramatically affected when the wife (Shadia) is promoted above her husband (Salah Zulficar) and is forced to redefine her role as both a wife and a boss. Another of his significant films is Wife Number 13 (1962), a loose adaptation of the 1001 Nights, with stars Shadia and Abaza. As a director, Abdel-Wahab worked well with stars, and was able to draw them out of their typecast roles; among his earliest films was Professor Fatima (1952), starring Faten Hamama as a lawyer who uses her cunning to prove the innocence of her neighbor’s son, wrongly accused of murder.

ABDO MOTA (2012)

This popular Egyptian film directed by Ismail Farouk and produced by Ahmed El Sobky, stars Mohamed Ramadan in his most prominent role as a thug (baltagi), Abdo Mota, who lives in Cairo’s informal districts (ashwaiyyat). Released in cinemas during Eid El Adha, the narrative is a typically sensationalist depiction of life in Cairo’s slums, marked by musical interludes (wedding dances, songs), street fights and brawls, thugs brandishing guns and knives, drug dealing and alcohol consumption, violence against women, unlikely love triangles, illegitimate children, abortion and self-induced miscarriage, and robbery and murder. Shabi/mahraganat (popular or electronic dance music) song lyrics are coupled with Ramadan’s rhyming slang—with some controversy among critics provoked by the film’s inclusion of women dancing to a song venerating the prophet Mohammed’s grandchildren (Hassan and Hussein) and their mother Fatma El Zahra. As is typical of Ahmed El Sobky productions, the narrative is haphazard and uneven—musical scenes are interspersed with action and drama designed to depict the extremity of life in the slums—and critics accused it of being vulgar and immoral: Abdo frequently appears bare chested and occasionally with a snake around his neck, and the film begins with his jumping out of bed with a woman as the police come to arrest him. He is determined to avenge the drug lord Mokhtar El Aw for failing to prevent his arrest, and the two men compete over not one but two love interests: Angham (Abdo’s cousin who has a food cart selling cooked beans) and Rabia (performed by the renowned dancer Dina), the “tart with a heart.” After going clean, settling down to sell bread on the pavement beside Angham’s bean cart, and working as a driver for the same rich family as Angham’s father, Abdo and Angham get engaged, but the joy is dramatically overturned when Abdo is framed for robbery and murder. Angham resolves to marry Mokhtar instead, and when questioned by her father, she articulates her despair: the whole slum is jinxed, she says, and just when things get really bad, the government steps in to finish them off. Abdo eventually manages to escape from prison and shoots Mokhtar and his henchmen. The film ends with Abdo on death row, full of regrets. After its release, the film became a widespread reference, Abdo Mota becoming synonymous with street thugs and tough-talking youth. Following the film’s success, Ramadan’s association with El Sobky was consolidated, and he performed a similar role in another El Sobky production, Lion’s Heart (Karim El Sobky, 2013).

ABDUL-HAMID, ABDULLATIF (1954–)

The internationally most renowned Syrian director, Abdul-Hamid was born in the port city of Lattakia in northwest Syria near the Turkish border. He graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in 1981, then began directing documentaries for the National Film Organization (NFO) in Damascus, where he also worked as an assistant director on Dreams of the City (1983) with VGIK peers Mohammad Malas (director) and Samir Zikra (coscriptwriter). After starring in a subsequent NFO production, Stars in Broad Daylight (1988)—directed by another VGIK graduate, Oussama Mohammad, in which Abdul-Hamid plays a character made up strongly to resemble then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad—he directed his first feature, Nights of the Jackal (1989), concerning a traditional rural family’s encounter with the modern state on the cusp of the Six-Day War. This was followed by Verbal Letters (1991), a story of unrequited love resembling Cyrano de Bergerac. Both were highly successful with Syrian audiences—the first Syrian films to meet with such popular reception since the Ba‘th Party first took power in 1963.

Abdul-Hamid’s Soviet training is evident in his directorial technique, which forges associative and interpretive connections, often within the span of a single zoom, between characters and their surroundings, and between everyday objects and their social functions, notwithstanding relatively straightforward story lines. These connections often find common ground in the Syrian experience of defeat, a salient thematic in At Our Listeners’ Request (2003) and Nights of the Jackal, and a recurrent trope in much Syrian cinema. At Our Listeners’ Request, set in 1969, exposes the potential for political enlightenment of even the most escapist of entertainment media, while Out of Coverage (2007), his seventh film, is a study of the personal reverberations of political imprisonment in everyday Syria. All of Abdul-Hamid’s films have received acclaim and awards at international film festivals, as well as praise at home.

ABDULLAH OF MİNYE (1989)

Whereas the first Islamic films appeared in Turkey during the 1970s, amid “true” national cinema debates, Abdullah of Minye was released after the demise of Yeşilçam, when the majority of Turkish cinemas had been closed down. Adapted from a novel, Yücel Çakmaklı’s film depicts challenges faced by Islamists in a fictional Egypt that allegorizes Turkey. The film was categorized as “white cinema”—along with several other, similarly themed films of the period—for its projection of strict religious purity and morality. Because of its financial success, Abdullah of Minye was followed the next year by a sequel, as white cinema films gained moderate if short-lived popularity and were screened in temporarily reopened cinemas and alternative venues such as coffeehouses and communal gathering places.

ABU SEIF, SALAH (1915–1996)

Known as the master of Egyptian realism, Abu Seif was born in Cairo and had a very lengthy and distinguished career that spanned more than 50 years, during which he directed more than 40 films. His first films were straightforward narratives, mostly romances, comedies, or costume dramas such as The Adventures of Antar and Abla (1948). Having begun his career as assistant director to Kamal Selim on Determination (aka The Will) (1939), he went on to study cinema in Paris and returned to Egypt to make a number of documentaries and Your Day Will Come (aka The Day of the Unjust) (1951), which he wrote with Naguib Mahfouz as a local adaptation of Émile Zola’s Therese Raquin. Abu Seif’s subsequent films placed emphasis on what was referred to as “The Popular Quarter” (Al-Hara Al-Shabia), often inspired by real incidents and featuring the plight of the poor, or an examination of the root causes of crime and criminality: almost coinciding with the Free Officers coup, Master Hassan (1952) is the story of a man who leaves his wife and child to live with a rich woman on “the other side of the Nile” in the upper-class Cairo district of Zamalek; Raya and Sakina (1953) is a dramatic reenactment of a real-life Alexandrian crime story, concerning two female serial killers who prey on young women; The Monster (1954) is a crime story about an underworld controlled by a lower-class criminal and brutal landowner; while The Thug (aka The Tough Guy) (1957) concerns a young peasant’s struggle to survive as a trader in a Cairo vegetable market controlled by malicious locals. Despite their focus on the lower classes, these films are highly polished commercial studio productions that make use of the star system.

In what some have considered to be a betrayal of his previous social commitment, Abu Seif then shifted his focus to the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy in films featuring morally complex characters but predictable endings. He frequently collaborated with Naguib Mahfouz as a scriptwriter and directed classic adaptations of Beginning and End (1960), starring Omar Sharif, and Cairo 30 (1966). Through his adaptations of the work of Ihsan Abdel Quddus, he also portrayed somewhat independent-minded women embroiled in illicit love affairs: The Empty Pillow (1957) and I Am Free (1959), both starring Loubna Abdel Aziz; and I Can’t Sleep (aka Nights without Sleep) (1957), The Closed Road (aka The Dead End) (1958), and Don’t Extinguish the Sun (1961), starring Faten Hamama, who also features in I Am Free. In A Woman’s Youth (1956), Tahiyya Carioca plays an older woman who uses her power to seduce and manipulate a young student.

But Abu Seif’s films were not always so serious and morally coded. In Between Heaven and Earth (1959), he places characters from different classes and backgrounds in an elevator stuck between two floors: in a comic ensemble of star performers, Hind Rustom plays a glamorous film star who is confronted with having to deliver a baby, and Abdel-Moniem Ibrahim a madman who has escaped from an asylum and bickers with a peasant (fellah) carrying a large tray of cooked game on his head. Still, Abu Seif made a valuable contribution to the political environment in which he worked—most notably with Case Number 68 (1968), in which he criticized the rampant corruption of the socialist policies of the time. More subtly, the opening of The Malatili Baths (1973), featuring shots of Cairo’s numerous statues of historical figures, demonstrated Abu Seif’s ability to adopt an experimental style, and while some have dismissed it as cheap sensationalism due to its overt sexual content, the film has been commended as one of the first Egyptian productions to include a relatively nuanced depiction of a homosexual character.

ABU SHADI, ‘ALI (1947–2017)

An Egyptian film critic and former member of the New Cinema Group, Abu Shadi wrote a number of critical surveys of Egyptian cinema and documentary. In 1996, he became Egypt’s chief censor, and was also director of the National Film Center, the annual National Film Festival, and the Ismailia International Film Festival.

ABU-ASSAD, HANY (1961–)

Born in Nazareth, Abu-Assad emigrated from Palestine–Israel to the Netherlands in 1980, where he studied engineering and first worked as a technical airplane engineer. His cinematic career began as a producer for television documentaries broadcast on England’s Channel 4 and the BBC. In 1992, he wrote and directed his first film, Paper House (aka House of Cards), which portrays a young Palestinian teenager trying to rebuild his family home after its destruction by the Israel Defense Forces. After writing and directing another short and serving as producer and director’s assistant for Curfew (Rashid Masharawi, 1993), Abu-Assad began his first full-length feature project as director of The Fourteenth Chick (1998), a comedy about a couple in Amsterdam. He followed that with a satirical documentary made for Dutch television, Nazareth 2000 (2000), about Palestinian Christians and Muslims quarreling, as seen through the eyes of two gasoline station attendants.

A common theme in Abu-Assad’s subsequent five films has been the Palestinian experience of physical fragmentation due to the Israeli Occupation and its impact on personal relations. Thus, in Rana’s Wedding: Another Day in Jerusalem (2002), a woman is not only separated from her fiancé by a checkpoint but ends up marrying him at one. Regarding larger political and social relations, Ford Transit (2002) depicts a taxi driver earning income due to checkpoints, as his clients shift their daily routine to circumvent or pass through them. Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), depicting the last days of two would-be suicide bombers, gained him international recognition, as well as a fair dose of controversy, thus making him perhaps the most internationally famous contemporary Palestinian filmmaker. Omar (2013) takes on the subject of collaboration and explores how the Israeli security forces pressure youth to spy on each other, additionally fragmenting relationships, families, and society. The Idol (2015) is a dramatization of the real-life story of Gaza-born singer Mohammed Assaf, who overcame the odds to become an overnight success story in the Arab Idol singing competition by illegally crossing the border into Egypt. Abu-Assad also directed the Hollywood-produced film The Mountain between Us (2017), about the survivors of a plane crash who must overcome their differences in order to survive—it is his first feature film not to focus on the Palestinian experience.

ADIÓS CARMEN (2013)

Using Amazigh languages in addition to Arabic and Spanish, Mohamed Amin Benamraoui’s film is an intimate historical tale set in the Rif of Morocco during the early 1970s at a time of growing tensions between Morocco and Spain. It focuses on a lonely 10-year-old boy, Amar, who becomes close friends with Carmen, an older Spanish usherette in a cinema. Carmen takes Amar under her wing and introduces him to films made in a language he does not understand, which serve progressively to compensate for an absent mother and an abusive uncle. Meanwhile, he discreetly carries messages between Carmen and her Moroccan lover.

ADRIFT ON THE NILE (CHATTER ON THE NILE) (1971)

Based on a novel by Naguib Mahfouz and directed by Hussein Kamal, Adrift on the Nile is arguably the most realistic depiction of drug use in Egypt, focusing primarily on a group of users from different segments of society (including a lawyer, an actor [Ahmed Ramzy], and a journalist), who gather to drink, party, and smoke hashish from a traditional homemade water pipe (koza) on a houseboat. The story is narrated by Anis Zaki (Emad Hamdi), an embittered petty government official who comments on the nation’s hypocrisy. On an excursion to the ancient ruins at Memphis, the group clambers onto a massive statue—while the women caress its face, the men light up and joke that the statue is also stoned. On the way back, the hedonistic group accidentally runs over a peasant woman with their car. Unable to think clearly, they decide to cover up the incident instead of reporting it, and each of them offers an excuse, blaming the government and then laughing the matter off—an allusion to the moral corruption of the time, involving specifically those who betrayed the ideals of independence and socialism for selfish gain. The final image, Anis—who has finally come to question the group’s behavior—walking through the streets of Cairo shouting, “The peasant woman is dead and we have to turn ourselves in,” is one of the most powerful endings in Egyptian cinema.

AFGHANISTAN

Historically, a geographical region contested by European colonial powers, epitomized by the “great game” for control of central Asia between Great Britain and Russia during the 19th century, much of Afghanistan was once part of the Persian Empire, and the western city of Herat, in particular, retains many cultural ties to Iran. The rise of the Taliban and the armed struggle that has continued throughout much of the country since their displacement by American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops following the events of 11 September 2001 resulted in many Afghans fleeing their country, and by 2003, 2.3 million had come to live in Iran, many registered and thus legally present but many others illegally settled. The plight of Afghan refugees has been the subject of, or been part of the background in, many Iranian films, including Baran (Majid Majidi, 2001) and Delbaran (Abolfazl Jalili, 2000). The withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known commonly as the Iran nuclear deal) in 2018 and the imposition of extensive U.S.-led sanctions on the country toward the end of 2018 caused an economic crisis, whereupon large numbers of Afghans left Iran, either to return to Afghanistan or to cross illegally into Turkey. Bahman Kiarostami captures this moment of return to Afghanistan and its administrative hassles at a border-crossing facility inside Iran in his documentary Exodus (2018).

In other Iranian films (The White Balloon [Jafar Panahi, 1995]; Taste of Cherry [Abbas Kiarostami, 1997]), Afghan characters play smaller but crucial roles. Iranian filmmakers have also recorded the struggle of the Afghani population within the country. Majidi’s documentary Barefoot to Herat (2002), for example, is shot largely in refugee camps in western Afghanistan, while Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar portrays a Canadian-born woman traveling in the country in search of her suicidal sister, along the way witnessing, as well as experiencing, many aspects of the physical and mental trauma of war, including a striking sequence in which one-legged people compete for prostheses dropped from the sky by helicopter. Although most of the film was shot in Iran, parts were filmed in Afghanistan. This is true too of Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist (1989), about a poor Afghan immigrant to Iran, while his subsequent short film, Afghan Alphabet (2001), portrays girls trying to attain an education denied them by the Taliban. Following the Taliban’s overthrow, Makhmalbaf worked extensively with the indigenous Afghani film community to revive cinema, which, having flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, was completely forbidden under Taliban rule. His daughter, Samira Makhmalbaf, shot her third feature, At Five in the Afternoon, and her contribution to the portmanteau film 09'11"01—September 11 (2002) there. More recently, several Afghan‒Iranian coproductions have been completed; for example, Afghan director Ramin Rasouli’s Lina (2017) and Dogs Did Not Sleep Last Night (2020), currently in production, were both shot largely in Iran.

A bomb attack on a film screening at the French cultural center in Kabul in 2014 illustrates the continuing challenges of film exhibition in Afghanistan. Today, this is largely restricted to the capital and caters mainly to young men watching industrial films from India and Pakistan. However, in 2019, documentary filmmaker Diana Saqeb Jamal launched I-Khanom, a cinema for women and families, opening with a screening of Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat’s The Orphanage. In May 2019, Sahraa Karimi became the first female general director of the Afghan Film Organization, and in August the Afghan Film Festival, a 10-day event celebrating the 100th anniversary of Afghan independence, took place, screening 100 Afghan and Iranian films.

AFTER SHAVE (2004)

Directed by Lebanese Hany Tamba, this satirical short consists of a comedic exchange between Mr. Raymond, a wealthy recluse, and Abu Milad, a traveling barber, as the latter cuts the former’s hair before a mirror in Raymond’s stately home. Abu Milad does not realize that his client is simultaneously conversing with his deceased wife, but the barber is well compensated so pays little heed. Finally, Raymond, prepared to leave home for a romantic rendezvous with his phantom wife, is hit and killed by a car as he tries to cross the street. As the lottery ticket he has just purchased flies into Abu Milad’s hands, Raymond’s ghost proceeds toward his date. Recalling Tamba’s earlier short, Mabrouk Again (2000), and prototypical of his subsequent feature, Melodrama Habibi (2008), After Shave juxtaposes mundane reality with nostalgic fantasy, in turn critically paralleling the disjuncture between the two fields of perception with the cinematic suspension of disbelief.

AKAD, LÜTFİ Ö. (1916‒2011)

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Akad was educated in economics and commerce but quickly quit his job at a bank and started working in the film industry. He wrote and directed his first film, Hit the Whore (1949), an adaptation of a novel about the Turkish War of Independence, with almost no filmmaking experience, only knowledge gleaned from reading Cahiers du cinéma. Akad became an early master of Yeşilçam, developing a methodological and partly Hollywood-inspired realist film language. While Akad directed popular melodramas, comedies, operetta adaptations, and musicals (Give Some Consolation, 1971), he is best known for his trilogy on migration that represents a transition from rural Anatolia to city life. The first film of the trilogy, The Bride (1973), often listed as one of the greatest Turkish films, provides a realistic perspective on the challenges faced by a rural family that migrates to Istanbul. Akad is affiliated with the Turkish National Cinema movement.

AKAN, TARIK (1949‒2016)

After winning a magazine’s star contest, Akan began his career as a leading actor in romantic comedies and melodramas. As the number of social realist dramas and leftist films rose slightly during the late 1970s, Akan also took roles in some of these political films. He appears as the handsome protagonist in the popular comedy Blue Beard (Ertem Eğilmez, 1974), about four bums who kidnap a famous singer. In The Herd (Zeki Ökten, 1978), he plays a villager in largely Kurdish southeastern Turkey who helps his neighbors try to take a herd of sheep to a city; in The Way (Şerif Gören, 1981), he plays one of five temporarily released prison inmates, each of whom experiences a different adventure; and in the realist drama The Wrestler (Zeki Ökten, 1984), he plays an oil wrestler who tries to earn a living with his wife.

AKIN, FATİH (1973–)

This Turkish German filmmaker was born in Germany and attended the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. Six years after his debut film, Short Sharp Shock (1998), Akın became a prominent transnational and European filmmaker with Head-On (2004), a fast-paced, highly aestheticized love story between a Turkish German woman and man, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He subsequently directed a documentary about the Turkish music world, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005). His subsequent The Edge of Heaven (2007) is a dramatic feature organized into a dialectical narrative that attempts to transcend the Turkish–German divide with a lesbian love story that challenges traditional perspectives on gender and sexuality. While Akın’s early work is influenced by that of Martin Scorcese, his later technique also invokes the thematics and narrative-compositional tropes of migrant cinema, including travel, border crossings, temporal disjunctions, multiethnic casting, and melodramatic language. In addition, recalling the new cinema of Turkey, Akın’s films articulate autobiographical themes and discourses related to his diasporic identity, as well as political tones reflecting his critical position, especially against the rise of nationalism and racism. His 2017 drama about rising nationalism in Europe and its effects on migrant populations, In the Fade, competed for the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival (its lead actress, Diane Kruger, won Best Actress) and received Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Golden Globe Awards.

AKKAD, MOUSTAPHA (1935–2005)

Akkad was an innovative film producer and director who made both Hollywood genre films and Arab- and Muslim-themed epics promoting cultural understanding, during a career spanning more than three decades. Born in Aleppo, Syria, and educated in film and theater in the United States, Akkad began his film career as a production assistant on Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962). His first film as director was The Message (1976), produced in English-language and Arabic versions with different actors, about the Prophet Mohammed (who was not shown on-screen in adherence to Islamic convention) and the birth of Islam. Carefully researched and endorsed as accurate by Qur’anic scholars and Muslim clerics, The Message garnered audiences worldwide. It was embraced by many as a respectful representation of Islam, but was banned in several Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia.

In 1978, Akkad forged a long-term partnership with John Carpenter, executive producer of the first and ultimately each of the eight Halloween slasher films. Akkad directed his second film, The Lion in the Desert, funded by Libyan head of state Muammar al-Gaddafi and starring Anthony Quinn (who also had featured in The Message), about a Muslim rebel who fought for Libya’s independence and self-determination. Akkad died in 2005 as a result of injuries sustained in a hotel bombing in Amman, Jordan; reportedly, more than 2,000 people attended his funeral services in Aleppo. At the time of his death, Akkad was continuing to seek financing for an epic project, Saladin, about the Muslim leader who fought the Crusaders, a story previously filmed by Youssef Chahine in 1963.

AL JANAHI, NAWAF (1977–)

Both a filmmaker and an advocate for Emirati filmmaking, Al Janahi is the son of the late Mohamed Al Janahi, an Emirati television and theater actor. Nawaf Al Janahi began acting at the age of seven and studied film at City College in San Francisco. His first narrative feature, The Circle (2009), was purchased by the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Center media network; his second, Sea Shadow (2011), was the first Emirati film funded by Image Nation and one of the first United Arab Emirates (UAE) films to get a major theatrical release in the territory. Al Janahi has also directed four shorts: On the Road (2003), Souls (2004), Mirrors of Silence (2006), and Between Two Worlds (2018). In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the Emirates Film Competition, thus beginning the development of a filmmaking community in the UAE. In 2014, he launched the Emirati Cinema Campaign, going on a bike tour through the UAE to bring local awareness to Emirati filmmaking. From 2014 to 2017, he curated the popular 50-seat Black Box Cinema at the annual Abu Dhabi Book Fair, showcasing shorts from around the Arab world.

AL JAZEERA

This Arab satellite news station started broadcasting from Doha, Qatar, a small oil-rich state on the Persian–Arabian Gulf, in 1996. A grant from Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who had come to power in a bloodless coup the previous year, established the station, partly to fill a vacuum left by the breakup of the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC) Saudi-based Arabic Television Network and partly to supply continued employment to many of the journalists who had previously worked there. To some degree, Al Jazeera was modeled on the supposed objectivity of the BBC, adopting the motto, “Give the opinion, then give the other opinion”—although debate continues over the degree of influence exercised on the station by the Qatari government. Still, the emir has apparently resisted increased pressure from the United States since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and subsequently since the 2011 civil and military crisis in Syria, to dissuade the station from broadcasting material perceived as anti-American—and anti-Zionist.

The evident professionalism, wide coverage of issues, and relative objectivity of Al Jazeera quickly made the station popular in much of the Arab world, where government-run terrestrial channels are typically heavily censored. It has displaced the BBC and CNN as the preferred news station in most Middle Eastern countries. The station was brought to worldwide attention at the onset of the war in Afghanistan. Since then, it has expanded into sports programming and, in November 2006, into English-language broadcasting through Al Jazeera English, based in Doha, London, Washington, and Kuala Lumpar, and managed largely by British journalists, including Robert Fisk. In 2013, however, Al Jazeera America replaced Al Jazeera English in the U.S. television market, although it ceased operations in 2016 under circumstances attributed to censorship, which had compromised its branding as an alternative news venue. The station is the subject of a widely distributed documentary, Control Room (Jehane Noujam, U.S., 2004).

Al Jazeera’s success has spurred the establishment of several other satellite news stations in the Middle East, although none as free of their funders’ influence. Many are either directly funded by the ruling family of Saudi Arabia—as in the case of Al Jazeera’s most important rival, Al Arabiyya—or are recipients of Saudi funding.

AL SIDDIQ, KHALID M. (KHALID M. SIDDIQ) (1945–)

This Kuwaiti film director and producer is known primarily for his groundbreaking feature The Cruel Sea (1971). Al Siddiq studied film informally at Central Studios in India. He later received practical film training in Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1990, all of his studios were looted and destroyed during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. However, he is still active, often working on foreign films under pseudonyms. The Cruel Sea continues to have an enduring effect and is often screened in international settings. It depicts challenges Kuwaitis faced in the pre-oil era, in particular the perilousness of pearl diving, which entailed spending several months on and in an often-rough sea each year. The film’s narrative follows a young man who takes on a dangerous and ultimately fatal journey in an attempt to find a danah—a large and expensive pearl that he hopes to use as a dowry with which to marry his sweetheart, a woman of higher social status. The film employs a pastiche of styles, fluctuating between realism and postmodernism. Its minimalist aesthetic contrasts while complementing Al Siddiq’s technical ambition, as it includes remarkable underwater scenes and deeply subjective point-of-view shots that probe cultural boundaries. The Cruel Sea is considered the first feature film from the Gulf region and has won several awards from international film festivals, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Among Al Siddiq’s other films as a director are Alia and Esam (1964), a short that focuses on vengeance and a blood feud between Bedu tribes; The Falcon (1965), a documentary about falconry; The Last Voyage (1966), a short film about an aging owner of a trading dhow (al-boom), which allegorizes the heyday of mercantile journeys to India and Africa, before an oil tanker paralyzes its movement; Faces of the Night (1968), a medium-length film about young lovers separated by arranged marriage; and Wedding of Zein (1976), a feature based on the classic Arabic novel of the same name by Sudanese author Tayib Saleh.

ALAEDDINE, HASSAN (SHOUSHOU) (1939–1975)

This Lebanese actor, famous for his long mustache and nasal voice, earned his screen name from his first film role in Shoushou and the Million (1963), which was also director Antoine Rémy’s debut film. By his early death at age 36, Shoushou had become a major comic figure in Lebanon, known for voicing sardonic social criticism.

ALAOUIÉ, BORHANE (1941–)

Born in southern Lebanon, Alaouié moved to Brussels in 1968 to study filmmaking at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion. He earned his reputation as a masterful filmmaker and cultural critic with his reenactment of the 1956 Israeli massacre of Palestinians, Kfar Kassem (1973), based on the novel by Assem Al Jundi and produced in Syria. Alaouié then collaborated with Tunisian filmmaker Lotfi Tabet on It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor (1977), which follows architect Hassan Fathi on a tour of Egypt. Among a handful of filmmakers who continued to direct films during the Lebanese Civil War, Alaouié’s work engages the effect of war and exile. Filmed on location during the early stages of the war, Beirut the Encounter (1981) set a precedent for portraying the rupture of relationships and the allure of departure through intimate wartime stories. With Letter from a Time of Exile (1988), shot in Paris, Alaouié began a series of experimental documentaries about the fragmentation of exile, experienced abroad first, then within one’s country. Black Night Eclipse, his contribution to the Tunisia-produced omnibus film The Gulf War . . . What Next? (1991), continues this exploration. Khalass (2007) shows seeds of hope in the friendship of three civil war survivors, despite renewed violence in Lebanon. His subsequent short film, Mazen and the Ant (2008), was produced by the Al Jazeera Children’s Channel. It recounts the story of a boy who decides to help an ant struggling to carry a grain of wheat, thus risking lateness to school. Alaouié teaches at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.

AL-ARISS, ALI (1909–1965)

The first Lebanese filmmaker, Al-Ariss directed two narrative features in the mid-1940s. The Rose Seller (1943) had limited success, but due to a controversy over artistic control, Kawkab, Princess of the Desert (1946) attracted large audiences upon its release. These are considered the first “talkies” in Lebanon, with the Egyptian vernacular spoken in Rose and a Bedouin vernacular in Kawkab. As with many Lebanese Muslims, Al-Ariss’s pan-Arabist politics favored building on the Egyptian model rather than creating a “Lebanese” cinema.

AL-DARADJI, MOHAMED (1978–)

Baghdad-born Al-Daradji fled Iraq for the Netherlands in 1995, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, then trained in directing and cinematography in the United Kingdom before returning to Iraq in 2003, in the midst of the Iraq War, to begin his professional filmmaking career. In 2006, he directed his first narrative feature, Ahlaam, a hyper-kinetic dramatization of the U.S. bombing of Baghdad, focusing on its effects within a mental institution and its titular, female patient, the highly aestheticized, dreamlike rendering of whose perceptions serves to universalize the devastation, thus enabling an allegorical reading of an essentially “insane,” irrational Iraqi mindset. Ahlaam received much international attention, including an Academy Award nomination as Iraq’s official entry. Al-Daradji’s next film, Son of Babylon (2009), also well-received internationally, narrates the journey of a young boy, Ahmed, and his sickly grandmother, Umm Ibrahim, as they travel across Iraq in search of his father, Ibrahim, apparently lost in war. As with Ahlaam, the causes and conditions of Iraqi wartime suffering are taken out of context, with stereotypical portrayals of Arabs and Muslims substituting for serious explanation. In 2013, Al-Daradji continued—while complicating—the journey motif with In the Sands of Babylon, a hybrid feature now centering on an Iraqi soldier (the missing father in Son of Babylon) who escapes imprisonment in Kuwait during the Gulf War, only to end up in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons. Twenty years later, Ibrahim’s fate is revisited by those who knew him, in investigative interviews conducted by Al-Daradji and interwoven throughout the fictional narrative, itself supplemented by the insertion of contemporary newsreel footage. Al-Daradji has been criticized for reportedly having collaborated with U.S. forces during the shooting of Ahlaam, and with the Iraqi police and military during the shooting of Son of Babylon. His most recent feature, Journey (2017), concerns an Iraqi female suicide bomber who decides to abort her planned action.

AL-DEGHIDI, INAS (1954–)

A rare female director in the Egyptian film industry, al-Deghidi was born in Cairo and graduated from the Cairo Film Institute in 1975. She then worked as an assistant to both Salah Abu Seif and Henri Barakat before directing her own features, beginning with Excuse Me, It’s the Law (1985). Women are prominent in many of her films, and she has been credited with reenvisioning their relationships to one another and to the dominant male gaze of mainstream commercial films, in works such as Cheap Flesh (1995), Night Talk (1999), Memoirs of an Adolescent (2002), and Researchers for Freedom (2004).

ALEXANDRIA (AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL) TRILOGY/QUARTET

Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Why? (1978), An Egyptian Story (1982), and Alexandria, Again and Forever (1990), to which his Alexandria . . . New York (2004) is sometimes added, make up an unofficial, broadly autobiographical, reflexively cinematic record of this most honored Egyptian director’s career. The first film, set in Alexandria during World War II, intercuts autobiographical material—scenes of Chahine’s prototype, Yehia (Mohsen Mohieddin), at Victoria College, attending movies, staging satirical reviews, reciting Hamlet, and eventually boarding a boat to the United States to train as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse—with documentary footage of the war and with several other plotlines. These include the story of an Egyptian aristocrat with a habit of kidnapping and murdering Allied soldiers, who falls in love with his latest victim (a young, working-class man from Dover eventually killed at El Alamein, prompting a pacifist musical montage among the gravestones); and a pregnant Jewish woman and her family who, fleeing Egypt from the advancing Germans, end up disillusioned by Zionism in Palestine. Meanwhile, her child’s father, a Muslim, participates halfheartedly in a crackpot scheme to assassinate Winston Churchill. The film is marked by its tonal breadth, abrupt editing, fantasy sequences, and overlapping narratives.

An Egyptian Story is set in London, where the protagonist, Yehia, now played by New Realist film star Nur El-Sherif, has traveled from Egypt for heart surgery following a stroke suffered on the set of The Sparrow (1973), of which he is the tempermental, self-absorbed director who ignores his wife (Yousra). However, by a device reminiscent of A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, 1946), the operation is intercut with a fantastical courtroom trial scene set inside the protagonist’s rib cage, where a 10-year-old Yehia is invoked, who periodically drops crystals into a large tube to illustrate how various life events—in addition to heavy smoking—have led to the clogging of his arteries. The film provides multiple flashbacks from the imaginary courtroom (also peopled with Yehia’s relatives) that convey the director’s relationships with women and men and his career as a filmmaker. Clips from several of Chahine’s earlier films, including Cairo Station (1958), are inserted, as is documentary footage from notable events in Egyptian history—underscoring the film’s allegorical layering. Yehia’s yearning for recognition in the West is in turn foregrounded, as is his ambivalent relationship with American cinema and the United States. In one flashback, he is portrayed taking his Jamila, the Algerian (1958) to a Soviet film festival, wondering whether a filmmaker can be a revolutionary, where he meets Henri Langlois of the French Cinémathèque. To get a film made, in one comic scene, Yehia pretends it will be a sex comedy.

The most explicitly self-reflexive of the series, a film about the making of a film that switches abruptly between and across plots, is Alexandria, Again and Forever. In one respect, the film focuses on the relationship between Yehia, this time played by Chahine himself, and his young protégé—and lover—Amir (Mohieddin). While Yehia wants to produce Shakespearean plays, wishing to see Amir cast as Hamlet, Amir himself is more interested in television and its ostensibly more pedestrian fare. In addition, the film focuses on a 1987 film industry strike in response to government changes in organizing laws. Once again, clips from other Chahine films are incorporated, with several from Cairo Station match-cut to Yehia and Amir as they dance, Singin’ in the Rain–like, in the streets of Berlin, where they have traveled for the film festival. Although humor is still present—in a campy version of Anthony and Cleopatra that costars Yousra (playing herself in the Chahine film), for instance, and by the use of accelerated footage—the film also expresses a deeper cynicism about Egyptian society.

Alexandria . . . New York, by contrast, is set in the United States, cross-cutting between Yehia’s contemporary visit to New York City to attend a retrospective of his work and a historical record of his days at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1940s. Yehia—again played by Chahine—has fathered a son in a reunion with Ginger, his lover from his Pasadena days. This son, Alexander, is now the lead dancer with the New York City Ballet and represents a self-absorbed United States for which Egypt is denigrated as “barely on the map” and the Arabs as savages who live in tents. Ultimately, Yehia rejects his egotistical, ignorant son, notwithstanding the latter’s skill and stature as a performing artist—a move clearly paralleling Chahine’s rejection of a once-admired America; the film bristles with disparaging comments about the United States. However, the fact that the same actor (Ahmed Yehia) plays both the young Yehia and Alexander draws critical attention to similarities between the two, and to Yehia’s—indeed Chahine’s—own egotism (also refracted across the earlier films in the series). Chahine apparently sees little hope in Alexandria or Egypt any longer either, while his attempt to draw parallels between his own career and Egypt’s history has struck critics as self-important.

ALEXANDROWICZ, RA’ANAN (1969–)

Born in Israel to Soviet immigrants, Alexandrowicz is known for directing films that analyze critically the contradictions of Zionism. His first feature, James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003), offers a scathing critique of Israeli capitalism that indicts both victims and victimizers. Before that, Alexandrowicz directed The Inner Tour (2001), a vérité documentary that sympathetically depicts a group of Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) who have acquired tourist visas under the auspices of an Israeli bus tour in order to briefly revisit their ancestral village sites in Israel. His The Law in These Parts (2011) exposes the apartheid legal system in the OPTs through personal interviews with the men who devised it.

ALGERIA

Much of Algeria, the largest country in Africa since the division of the Sudan, consists of the Sahara desert, with the major cities of Algiers and Oran positioned in the north on the long Mediterranean coast. It is bordered by Tunisia and Libya to the east; Niger, Mali, and Mauritania in the south; and Morocco as well as a sliver of the Western Sahara to the west. Once populated mostly by Berber peoples, the region, known together with modern-day Tunisia and Morocco (and sometimes, Libya and Mauritania) as the Maghreb, experienced successive waves of Arab Muslim immigration, and much of the region was united under Arab rule in the eighth century. Algeria became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and earned notoriety as the base of the Barbary pirates until the early 19th century. The French invaded the country in 1830, and Algeria became an integral part of the French colonial system.

The assimilationist policies characteristic of French colonial rule, whereby the elite of colonized peoples were instructed in French culture and history and groomed as “overseas Frenchmen,” were applied somewhat differently in Algeria than elsewhere, as a very large number of French and other European settlers arrived, and the country, uniquely, became a part of France, consisting of three regional départements. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Arab and Berber Algerians were not given French citizenship. Thus two parallel cultures existed in the country by the beginning of the 20th century, and this is reflected in the cinema, which was the exclusive province of the European settlers prior to independence in 1962. Thus, the representation of Arabs in French-made Algerian films was typical of colonial cinema in their portrayal of happy fools or uncivilized ruffians.

By 1954, 300 cinémathèques, based in the country’s northern urban centers, were serving settler audiences. Algeria was also the setting for exotic adventure films, of which Julien Duvivier’s poetic realist classic Pépé Le Moko (1937) is the best known. Not a single feature was made by an Algerian during this period. However, it seems likely that the colonial practice of depicting the indigenous, non-European population as barbarians in need of civilizing guidance may have backfired, since the clear evidence these films supply of French colonial-settler—or pied-noir—racism and class consciousness seems to have helped catalyze the anticolonial struggle.

Many Algerians fought alongside the French in World War II, but calls for independence after the defeat of Nazism were met with the brutal suppression of demonstrators in May 1945. The war for liberation began in 1954, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The French fought hard to maintain control, but their resolve was weakened by determined resistance, failure in Southeast Asia, and increasing anticolonial sentiment at home, until, in 1962, independence was conceded. Algerian national cinema started just before, when the provisional government-in-exile created a production unit and then a film school directed by René Vautier, a French filmmaker active in the FLN. Vautier trained the earliest Algerian filmmakers, including Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, Amar Laskri, and Ahmed Rachedi, who made shorts from FLN bases in Tunisia.

Most of the major institutions organized by the newly independent Algerian state directly modeled those in France or those established during the colonial era. The government dictated the themes that films were to treat, privileging prevailing ideologies of national unity. The focus of virtually all filmmaking during those early years (cinéma moujahid) was the war of liberation, a subject vital to the first generation of Algerian filmmakers, many of whom had been active in the struggle. In 1963, the state created its production organization, the Office des Actualités Algériennes, the focus of which gradually shifted from newsreel productions to short documentaries, then to fictional features, including Lakhdar-Hamina’s The Wind of the Aures (1966). Meanwhile, Mustapha Badie directed the ambitious The Night Is Afraid of the Sun (1966), a three-hour epic study of the origins, development, and outcome of the war, for the Centre National du Cinéma. In addition, the state television organization, Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne, founded in 1962, supported cinema development by coproducing films and training professionals.

In 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed realist re-creation The Battle of Algiers was released. The Algerian state nationalized the country’s exhibition sector, built postproduction facilities, and opened the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (ONCIC), a state-run monopoly production agency responsible for some of the most influential Arab and African films, marked by their directors’ personal critical perspectives and cinematic styles. The first ONCIC film, The Way (Mohamed Slim Riad, 1968), analyzes its director’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France. ONCIC subsequently moved into coproduction, lending support to three films directed by Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and, in 1975, to Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Lakhdar-Hamina’s epic account of events leading up to the establishment of the independent Algerian state, and the first Arab (or, for that matter, African) film to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’or. By that time, Lakhdar-Hamina had assumed a position of power within ONCIC, of which he would eventually serve as director from 1981 to 1984.

During the 1970s, Algerian cinema shifted focus to the theme of agrarian reform, the subject of The Charcoal Burner (Mohamed Bouamari, 1972), Noua (Abdelaziz Tolbi, 1972), and The Nomads (Sid Ali Mazif, 1975). The period also witnessed the appearance of a “new cinema” (cinéma djidid)—films made on low budgets and typically utilizing neorealist approaches to treat social problems. A new generation of filmmakers had begun to represent Algeria’s everyday economic, cultural, and sociological life in films such as Omar Gatlato (Merzak Allouache, 1976), Children of the Wind (Brahim Tsaki, 1981), and Nahla (Farouk Beloufa, 1979).

ONCIC was disbanded in 1984; its duties were split between separate production and distribution agencies, and further reforms followed in 1987, when the Centre Algérien pour l’Art et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (CAAIC) assumed both duties, while the reorganized state television company also offered support to filmmakers and increasingly cooperated with CAAIC. Emigration and the difficulties encountered by Algerians in France were the subject of films such as Ali in Wonderland (Rachedi, 1978) and several more focused on women’s issues, including Houria (Mazif, 1986). Initially, the 1987 reforms seemed to favor indigenous Algerian production, but after a promising start to the 1990s, Algerian cinema declined rapidly in the face of the country’s internal political turmoil and the rise of Islamist movements. Still further reorganization followed in October 1993, and the ensuing social and industrial confusion and chaos became refracted across a number of films, including Touchia (Mohamed Rachid Benhadj, 1993), The Honor of the Tribe (Mahmoud Zemmouri, 1993), Youssef: The Legend of the Seventh Sleeper (Mohamed Chouikh, 1993), and Bab el-Oued City (Allouache, 1994).

These circumstances also forced a number of filmmakers into exile or silence. Funding was sought increasingly from Europe, particularly France, and exhibition was limited primarily to film festivals and European art houses. Cinema audiences declined from nine million in 1980 to half a million in 1992, and the 458 cinemas existing to serve a colonial audience at the time of independence was reduced to 15 by 1999. After 1995, film production in Algeria had been reduced to one or two films per year, most of them French coproductions that retreat from urban settings and evidence a shift from realistic narratives to fables and allegories. In The Desert Ark (Chouikh, 1997), for example, interethnic struggles within a remote desert community tinged with a mysticism that nonetheless resists orientalism serve to metaphorize contemporary Algeria. Some filmmakers turned to the Atlas Mountains, and the first three films in Kabyle, the Algerian Berber language, were released between 1995 and 1997. When CAAIC was shut down in 1998, however, numerous filmmakers were left with incomplete films, and by the end of the decade, most of the country’s major directors had chosen to live abroad, as Algerian cinema became largely exilic. The requirements of filming in exile and depending on European financing necessitated the emergence of an Algerian cinema designated as such by the nationality of its filmmakers rather than by shooting locations, and by its treatment of subjects specific to the Algerian experience, including immigration, women’s struggles, and internal conflicts. Allouache made two films in France, where Zemmouri also directed his musical comedy 100% Arabica (1997), while Benhadj shot Mirka (1999) in Italy.

Films made after the turn of the 21st century have been few in number and have continued to emphasize similar themes. Several have examined the challenges facing Algerian women, including Rachida (Yamina Bachir-Chouikh, 2002), The Beacon (Belkacem Hadjaj, 2004), and Enough! (Djamila Sahraoui, 2006). Unsurprisingly, the subject of emigration and return has also been prominent, not least in the work of beur filmmakers Mehdi Charef (Daughter of Keltoum [2001]) and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche (Wesh Wesh, What’s Happening? [2001]). Meanwhile, Algerian exiles and beur directors have continued to focus on the Algerian immigrant community in France, as in Salut Cousin! (Allouache, 1996) and Neighbors (Malik Chibane, 2005). In addition, Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006), an exposé of the poor treatment and lack of recognition given to Algerian (and, more broadly, North African) soldiers serving in World War II, brought some of the actions and effects of colonialism to a wider audience. Bouchareb then directed Outside the Law (2010), which revisits the history of the Algerian war of liberation in France, culminating in the attacks on Algerian demonstrators in 1961, earlier depicted in Bourlem Guerdjou’s Living in Paradise (1998).

Contemporary Algerian cinema is supported by the state in a complex manner via a funding body, the National Fund for the Development of Arts, Techniques, and the Film Industry (FDATIC), and an institution that enables coproductions, currently the Algerian Center for the Development of Cinema. Still, the way in which film funding is attributed remains opaque. Major regional or international events such as L’année de l’Algérie / Algeria for a Year in France in 2003; Algiers, Capital City for Arab Culture in 2008; the Panafrican Film Festival in Algiers in 2009; and Constantine, Capital City for Arab Culture in 2015 were enabled by funds that contributed to the production of feature films and shorts, but these were often attached to films with specific themes. Twenty-first-century Algerian cinema has been characterized by didactic biopics about heroes of the war of liberation, such as Mostefa Ben Boulaid (2008) and Krim Belkacem (2016), both directed by Ahmed Rachedi; Zabana! (Ould Khelifa, 2012); and Larbi Ben M’Hidi (Bachir Derrais, 2018), a film originally censored due to controversial scenes about the tensions among the leaders of the revolution. Such films have been funded by the FDATIC as well as the Ministry of the Mujahidin and have been said to cost as much as five or six million euros each—although reliable figures about budgets are not readily available. The FDATIC also finances auteur films whose overall budgets are much more modest.

While Algerian cinema is still very much focused on its troubled history in the 20th century, a new generation of filmmakers has emerged who have opened up new ways of thinking about film form, notably in the works of Tariq Teguia and Karim Moussaoui, but also in the short film Le jardin d’essai (Dania Reymond, 2016), shot in the titular tropical garden in Algiers, where a company is depicted rehearsing scenes for a new film taking place in that besieged city, when reality progressively takes over the fiction, and in Kindil El Bahr (Damien Ounouri, 2016), in which a postcardlike, starkly lit family outing becomes a nightmare when the mother wanders off alone, swimming away from the beach, and turns into a sea monster that avenges the violence she has suffered. Other films have challenged the status quo more directly, recounting the struggles of the majority of the population who have few means to improve their lives. Notable in this regard are A Roundabout in My Head (Hass Ferhani, 2015), a documentary shot in a slaughterhouse serving as both a metaphor and a striking visual evocation of violence, where workers express their disillusionment; Abou Leïla (Amin Sidi-Boumédiène, 2019), an experimental film comprised of a succession of violent scenes that contradict or delegitimize previous ones, about two old friends who journey to the south of the country; and The Blessed (Sofia Djema, 2017), in which a middle-aged couple wanders across the city, meeting friends, being checked by police, and coming to the rescue of their son as they reminisce about the political ideals that have oriented their lives and search for a place to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The Blessed is a relatively uncommon example of an Algerian film whose maker sought funding outside the country, whether in order to secure funds more quickly and reliably or to lessen the risk of censorship.

ALGHANEM, NUJOOM (1962–)

Educated at Ohio University in the United States and Griffith University in Australia, Nujoom Alghanem has arguably become the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) most accomplished filmmaker. Her documentaries examine a variety of subjects with critical perspectives on cultural heritage, usually in the form of biography. Between Two Banks (1999) considers the life of the last man to row the human-powered ferry across the Dubai creek; Al-Mureed (2008) portrays a leading Emirati Sufi sheikh, Shaikh Abdul Raheem Al-Mureed; Hamama (2010) portrays a traditional healer, Hamma from Sharjah; Amal (2010) portrays Syrian actress Amal Hawijeh, who chose to relocate to Dubai; Red Yellow Blue (2013) portrays one the foremost (female) Emirati artists, Najat Makki; Nearby Sky (2014) portrays Fatima Ali Alhameli, the first Emirati woman to enter camels into auctions and beauty pageants; Sounds of the Sea (2014) depicts the male homosocial world of heritage and sea songs in the northern Emirates; Honey, Rain, and Dust (2016) follows three female beekeepers in the UAE who ponder their future in view of global climate disruption; and Sharp Tools (2017) portrays the late (male) Emirati artist Hassan Sharif, considered the founder of modern Emirati art. Alghanem has also made several short narrative films, including The Park (1997) and Salma’s Dinner (2012), and has published collections of poetry in collaboration with her husband, Khalid Albudoor.

AL-GHOUSSAINI, SAMIR (1948–2003)

Born in Baakline, a village in Mount Lebanon, filmmaker Samir Al-Ghoussaini started his career as a script boy and assistant director for filmmaker Tayssir Abboud. His first feature, The Cats of Hamra Street (1972), is an eccentric yet moralizing comedy inspired by the U.S. counterculture, with dialogue in English and the Egyptian vernacular. The film’s narrative follows the unruly adventures of two couples—Sami and Mona and Kamil and Souad—involved with a mischievous gang of bikers and drug addicts, the Hamra Cats. The tragic outcome of the film, Souad’s death, and the final confrontation between Sami and the Cats express a condemnation of the perceived deviant influence of Western counterculture on Lebanese youth. The Cats of Hamra Street’s significant box-office returns helped launch Al-Ghoussaini’s career, after which he made more than 20 commercial features between 1972 and 1994, including The Captive (1973), Women for the Winter (1974), Days in London (1977), The Adventurers (1981), The Return of the Hero (1983), Fadous and the Hitchhiker (1989), and Operation: Golden Phoenix (1994). Al-Ghoussaini’s 1979 film The Beauty and the Giants marked the beginning of the Lebanese action film genre, with its tough men, attractive women, and gangster plots set against a (Lebanese) civil war backdrop. See also CHARAFEDDINE BROTHERS, YOUSSEF (1945–) AND FOUAD (1941–).

AL-GINDI (EL-GUINDY), NADIA (1940–)

Egypt’s biggest female star throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Al-Gindi broke into cinema after winning a prize in a beauty contest. She was married to actor Emad Hamdi for 10 years, while she played supporting roles in various generic melodramas. From the mid-1980s on, however, al-Gindi was cast increasingly in action films and, in time, especially espionage films. These were often directed by Nader Galal, examples being Mission in Tel Aviv (1992) and 48 Hours in Israel (1998). Her roles have typically been as feminine, sexualized characters who outwit their rivals. Only rarely has al-Gindi worked with less commercial or mainstream directors—although she appeared in Khairy Beshara’s Wild Desire (1991) and played a nurse in the independent film festival favorite Coming Forth by Day (Hala Lotfy, 2012).

ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS (2000)

Nabil Ayouch’s second feature revolves around four 12-year-old street children in Casablanca struggling to free themselves from an onerous gang leader and his abusive followers; in the struggle, Ali is killed. The body of the film follows his three comrades, played by actual street children, as they seek to honor Ali’s memory and dreams (of becoming a sailor) by burying him at sea. In the process, they locate Ali’s estranged mother, a prostitute, and befriend a helpful old sailor willing to believe in them and help them overcome obstacles. Ayouch interweaves animated sequences of Ali’s often drug-induced dreams with harsh depictions of the struggles street children face, thus mixing realism with experimental fantasy. In particular, the film treats the street children humanistically, relying less on stereotypes and more on sympathetic personal interrogation of their lives. By the same token, the film’s visual lushness, which lends it a romantic quality quite distinct from Third Cinema aesthetics, has incurred some scholarly criticism. The film was a smash hit in Morocco and won many national and international awards.

ALJAFARI, KAMAL (1972–)

This Palestinian filmmaker, visual artist, and educator was born in Ramleh and raised in Jaffa. He received his professional training at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany, whereupon he began making experimental shorts and documentaries concerning the problematics of exile and diaspora from the transnational perspective of a return to a ruined past. His short film Visit Iraq (2003) situates this perspective metonymically in Switzerland at the onset of the Iraq War, utilizing the setting of an abandoned Iraqi Airways ticket agency to analyze visually the everyday apathy of Swiss pedestrians toward the empty property’s apparently mysterious vacancy. The essayistic documentary The Roof (2006) carries the return-to-ruins theme to Aljafari’s family home in Jaffa, which is under perpetual threat of demolition by Israeli real-estate developers. It adopts a slow-moving cinematic style that recalls, while complicating, the play between time and environment as reflected in architecture that also characterizes the films of Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. The Roof combines expository shooting with staged fiction, a technique expanded by Port of Memory (2009), a feature-length documentary that continues Aljafari’s critical nostalgic quest, in the form of a compilation film, also set in Jaffa, comprised of scenes from Israeli bourekas genre films intercut with contemporary shots, recalling The Roof, of architectural ruins. Recollection (2015) reprises Port of Memory in order to integrate the presence of passersby—Palestinians as well as Jewish Iraqis—into Aljafari’s search for home beneath aestheticized layers of destruction.

AL-KASABA THEATRE AND CINEMATHEQUE

This Palestinian nongovernmental organization was established in Jerusalem in 1970 as Theatre Arts Group. In 1987, following the First Intifada, due to violence, general strikes, and a suffering economy, all theaters and cinemas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) closed. Relocated to Ramallah in June 2000, as Al-Kasaba, it was the first theater and cinémathèque established after a 13-year hiatus. The current location houses seating halls and a gallery and is the only professional fully equipped venue in the OPTs for theater productions, visual exhibitions, musical performances, and films. It hosts three daily film screenings, including international blockbusters, children’s films, Palestinian and Israeli features, and documentaries, in addition to special film weeks and festivals. Al-Kasaba also assists playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists marketing to Palestinian audiences.

ALLOUACHE, MERZAK (1944–)

Born in Algiers, Allouache graduated from the Institut National du Cinéma d’Alger and, in 1967, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in France, first working at the Office des Actualités Algériennes, then at the Centre National du Cinéma, where he directed documentaries. He is one of Algeria’s most prolific directors, with more than 20 films between Algeria and France, where he spent the most turbulent years of Algeria’s unrest. Allouache’s films always manage to involve Algeria—for example, by portraying Algerian immigrants in France.

His first feature, Omar Gatlato (1976), was hailed by French critics as the declaration of a new Algerian cinema (cinéma djidid); its success suggested that Algerians craved films that would deal complexly with Algerian social reality. Bab el-Oued City (1994), filmed in Algeria during the civil war and edited in France, captured the beginnings of the war from the same poor district of Algiers in which Omar Gatlato is set. Salut Cousin! (1996), a French coproduction, dramatizes with lighthearted humor the obstacles and challenges facing diasporic Algerians in Paris trying both to earn a living and to enjoy life under postcolonial conditions by playing on the projection by Algerians themselves of Western anti-Arab stereotypes onto the beur community. Returning to Algiers in 1999, Allouache directed The Other World (2001), about a young French woman’s search for her Algerian lover, who has been kidnapped by an armed militia. Characteristic of cinéma djidid, this film complicates the relationship between “the people,” the army, and the Islamists, refusing to characterize the national struggle and violence in Algeria in simple moral terms.

Allouache’s subsequent Bab el Web (2004) revolves around a cyber-cafe in Bab el-Oued, from which the broke but enterprising Bouzid (played by Faudel, a well-known singer) casually invites a female cyber-pal in Paris to visit him, not realizing how costly this will be for both him and his likewise penniless brother. For 40 years, Allouache’s films have examined the uneasy neocolonial relationship between Algeria and France.

Tamanrasset (2007) is a made-for-television film set in the south of Algeria that depicts the plight of African immigrants from Mali who cross the border in the hope of eventually getting to Europe. Set in Mostaganem, a port city, the title of Alloauche’s Harragas (2009)—literally “those who burn”—references the stories of migrants to Europe. He has been prolific throughout the 2010s, as he continues to explore the tensions, trauma, and violence in contemporary Algerian culture. In Normal! (2011), Allouache presents a self-reflexive interrogation of cinema and censorship, as a group of young people watch and critique a film in progress, while in The Repentant (2012), a militant Islamist (Nabil Asli) decides to give up his weapons and attempts unsuccessfully to reintegrate into civil society. The Rooftops (2013) explores the trajectories of different protagonists over the course of a day as they confront the absence of prospects and the violence of a divided culture. The title of Madame Courage (2015) refers to a powerful drug that can be bought on the streets, and is another indictment of contemporary Algerian society. The film focuses on Omar—possibly a reference to Allouache’s own Omar Gatlato—a petty thief who spends his life on the street or at home listening to the religious preachers his mother watches on television, but who falls in love with Selma, whom he had been prepared to rob. Enquête au Paradis (2017), a docu-fiction on religious indoctrination, follows a journalist who interviews various young people who have been listening to religious sermons. Effectively, the film questions the future of a country whose rulers, Allouache believes, have chosen to accede to the demands of religious groups.

ALMAGOR, GILA (1939–)

One of Israel’s foremost actresses, Gila Almagor has starred in countless Israeli films and stage plays. She is perhaps most famous for her roles in The Summer of Aviya (1988) and its sequel, Under the Domim Tree (1995), both directed by Eli Cohen and based on autobiographical novels recounting Almagor’s childhood and young adulthood in Israel, during which she and her mother, a Holocaust survivor, faced difficulty assimilating into Israeli society and its ersatz Middle Eastern milieu. Almagor’s embodiment of the Zionist imperative for Jews to assimilate an idealized “Oriental” culture while rejecting actual Jewish–Arab history is palpable in the bourekas film Sallach Shabbati (Ephraim Kishon, 1964), a musical comedy in which she plays an Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) kibbutznik who falls in love with a Mizrahi (Arab Jewish) immigrant, and in The House on Chelouche Street (Moshe Mizrahi, 1973), a post-bourekas melodrama in which Almagor offers one of Israeli cinema’s early sympathetic portrayals of a Mizrahi woman struggling to survive against the odds. Likewise, in Siege (Gilberto Tofano, 1969), a poetic realist work of the Young Israeli Cinema, Almagor plays a war widow who allegorizes a nostalgic, almost mythological buttressing of Zionism in the context of Israel’s demographic reconfiguration following the Six-Day War.

Upon massive Mizrahi defection from the moderate Labor Party to the right-wing Likud Party throughout the 1980s, Almagor returned to less progressive Mizrahi roles in, for instance, Sh’chur (Shmuel Hasfari, 1994), Passover Fever (Shemi Zarhin, 1995), and, much later, Three Mothers (Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006), in which she appears as a paradigmatic maternal figure. Almagor’s later films include The Debt (Assaf Bernstein, 2007), in which she plays a former Mossad agent who assists in the capture of a Nazi war criminal, and Mossad (Alan Gur Arye, 2019), a parody in which Mossad and CIA agents must work together to rescue an American billionaire who has been kidnapped. See also ISRAELI OCCUPATION; ORIENTALISM; WOMEN.

AL-MANSOUR, HAIFAA (1974–)

Raised in eastern Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf, Haifaa Al-Mansour studied comparative literature at the American University of Cairo in Egypt, then completed a master’s degree in directing and film studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. Award-winning short films Who? (1997), The Bitter Departure (2000), and The Only Way Out (2001) preceded her feature-length documentary Women in the Shadows (2005) and her narrative feature Wadjda (2012), both of which examine limits to mobility for women in Saudi Arabia. After living in Bahrain, she moved with her husband and two children to the United States, where she has directed a Hollywood biopic on Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley (2017), and the African American rom-com Nappily Ever After (2018). Al-Mansour is the first recipient of the Saudi Film Council grant—for The Perfect Candidate (2019), about the issue of male guardianship.

AL-QATTAN, OMAR (1964–)

Born in Beirut, educated at Oxford and Belgium’s Institut National Supérieur des arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion, Al-Qattan was assistant and executive producer on a number of Palestinian films in the late 1980s, including some by Michel Khleifi. He has directed four documentaries: Dreams and Silence (1991), a portrait of a Palestinian refugee in Jordan; Going Home (1995), the recollections of an ex–British Mandate army major; made-for-television Muhammad, Legacy of a Prophet (2002), a reconstruction of contemporary rituals evoking the Prophet’s life; and Diary of an Arts Competition / Under Occupation (2002), a record of an art exhibition organized during the Al-Aqsa Intifada’s West Bank curfews. Al-Qattan has also produced educational Arabic-language CD-ROMs (under Sindibad Multimedia, which he founded); is a trustee of the A. M. Qattan Foundation, an independent Palestinian cultural and educational organization based in Ramallah; and, in 2004, launched the Palestinian Audio-Visual Programme (PAV). PAV runs cinema clubs in schools across the Occupied Palestinian Territories and offers grants to young filmmakers and artists.

AL-RAHEB, WAHA (1960–)

Born in Cairo, Egypt, to Syrian parents, Damascus-based Waha Al-Raheb is a filmmaker, actress, and writer. Educated in France, Al-Raheb published a thesis on women in Syrian cinema from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. With a career spanning movie and television projects, she wrote and directed the 2003 film Dreamy Visions, the first Syrian feature made by a woman. Integrating surreal moments of fantasy, the film focuses on a highly intelligent but oppressed young woman who finally rebels and leaves home to become a guerrilla fighter in Lebanon. Al-Raheb herself plays a neighbor and friend who is also traumatized by patriarchy. Al-Raheb was challenged by censorship both during stages of development of her screenplay in Syria and, according to the filmmaker, in attempts to get her film screened at film festivals abroad in the post-9/11 era due to its political content.

AL-THAWADI, BASSAM (1960–)

Educated at the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema and instrumental in the development of the Bahrain Radio and Television Corporation, Bassam Al-Thawadi has produced and directed three feature films, The Barrier (1990), The Visitor (2004), and A Bahraini Tale: A True Story (2006). The Barrier is considered the first narrative feature ever made in Bahrain. The Visitor employs the thriller genre to offer social commentary about generational malaise. A Bahraini Tale examines social tensions, including violence against women, in Bahrain in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab‒Israeli War, as a sense of community begins to fragment along religious (Sunni, Shi‘a, Jewish) and ethnic (Arab, Afro-Arab, Iranian) lines. Al-Thawadi has also produced films directed by other Bahrainis, including Four Girls (Hussain Abbas Al-Hulaybi, 2007), about four young women trying to start a business. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the fifth edition of the Gulf Film Festival in 2012.

ALSHARIF, BASMA (1983–)

This experimental film director studied filmmaking at the University of Illinois. Her short films Home Movies Gaza (2013), O, Persecuted (2014), and Deep Sleep (2014) represent esoteric meditations on Palestinian history and Alsharif’s identity as a Palestinian in the diaspora. In 2017, Alsharif produced her first feature-length experimental film, Ouroboros, about the cyclical and intertwined histories of America, France, Italy, and Palestine.

AMAZIGH FILMS (BERBER FILMS)

The term Amazigh (plural Imazighen) is increasingly used in place of Berber—a term derived from the Greek word for barbarian—to describe North Africans who are the ancestors of the population living in the region prior to the Arab advance following the death of Mohammed, beginning in 649. The Amazigh people speak a variety of closely related languages of which one, Tamazight, is sometimes applied to the totality of Berber languages. The Moroccan government repressed most expressions of Amazigh culture during the 1970s and 1980s by arresting activists, raiding cultural centers, and forbidding cultural production in Tamazight, with the exception of folklore. The repression was lifted during the mid-1990s, when Amazigh video features began to appear. Since then, Amazigh films on video have been produced privately in greater number, although they did not receive support from the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) until the mid-2000s; an example is Tamazight Oufella (Mohamed Mernich, 2008). By this time, the features of Narjiss Nejjar had begun to appear, starting with Cry No More (2003), funded by the CCM, concerning a group of Amazigh prostitutes—at the time, the first Moroccan film to have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 30 years—which remains a relatively well-known depiction of the community. Nejjar’s subsequent Rif Lover (2010) and Mohamed Amin Benamraoui’s Sellam et Dimitan (2008) and Adiós Carmen (2013) are also set in the Rif region in the north of Morocco and use Amazigh languages in addition to Arabic. (The Hirak Rif movement there has been restive during the second half of the 2010s, following the killing of Mohcine Fikri, a fishmonger, in October 2016.)

Amazigh filmmaking in Morocco also occurs in the southern region of the country, Tachelhit. Initially, such Amazigh films concentrated on the production of music videos; only later did fictional features emerge that would support Amazigh cultural development in the country, not least by filling the void left by cinema and television. Most of these films contain rural settings, although several concern urban Amazigh communities, mixing professional with amateur performers and telling stories about Amazigh life or mythology. Numerous well-known Amazigh singers have been featured in these early films—an outgrowth of the prior music videos. Drama and humor are their predominant genres, with most narratives set in modern times; however, several period pieces have also been produced. Amazigh videos are sold throughout Morocco and in Europe, to accommodate the large number of migrating Tamazight speakers, a trend supported by the acknowledgment of the Amazigh language as an official one, alongside Arabic, in Morocco in 2016, opening various mechanisms of funding to Berber-language productions.

Amazigh filmmaking is by no means confined to Morocco. Assia Djebar, born in the Amazigh city of Chenoua on the north coast of Algeria, claimed regret that she was not brought up to speak a Berber language. Her two films, The “Nouba” of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978) and La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1982), are, however, rooted in the musical and cultural traditions of the region. The term nouba refers to a “turn,” to poets or musicians awaiting their time to perform; while the zerda is a traditional celebration. The Kabyle artists of Algeria (who also inhabit parts of Morocco) have played a significant role in promoting Amazigh culture across the region, often with French support. The National Amazigh Film Festival, held annually in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, since 1999, showcases feature films and shorts as part of a wider effort to highlight linguistic and cultural diversity within the Amazigh communities across the Maghreb that were marginalized under French colonialism’s, and the newly independent Maghrebi governments’, preference for Arabic language and culture. By the same token, the attenuated distinction between Amazigh and Arab cultures (especially in Algeria), originally a product of a colonialism that exploited such differences for political gain, is still evident in ongoing social struggles for Amazigh cultural rights, including those surrounding cinematic production. This is especially evident in controversies surrounding the establishment in Algeria of the Institut Royal du Cinématographique Amazigh, a government agency that has been accused by Amazigh filmmakers of being overly regulated and hence censorial of Amazigh cultural representation. The Amazigh language was officially recognized in Algeria in 2011. See also BACCAR, SELMA (1945–); BOUHMOUCH, NADIR (1990‒); NACIRI, SAÏD (1960–).

AMEUR-ZAÏMÈCHE, RABAH (1966–)

Of Algerian origin, beur filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche has lived in France since 1968, where his own life struggles have been his main source of inspiration. In his first directorial feature, Wesh Wesh, What’s Happening? (2001), Ameur-Zaïmèche also stars as Kamel, a young Maghrebi who returns home to the impoverished Paris suburbs (banlieues) after an absence of seven years, having spent five in a French prison and two deported to his native Algeria (under a 1993 French law, Franco-Maghrebis may be denied citizenship if they are sentenced to more than six months in jail). Although he tries to reestablish his life in France, he is impeded at every turn by his illegal status and the French police who harass him and his delinquent brother, Mousse, a drug dealer, notwithstanding assistance from his well-intentioned French Communist girlfriend, a local schoolteacher. Following a raid in which the police spray his mother with mace, Kamel kills one of the officers and steals his gun; the film concludes ambiguously, as the police chase Kamel into a forest from which the distant sound of two gunshots marks the film’s final moment. In his subsequent Bled Number One (aka Back Home) (2005), Ameur-Zaïmèche plays a former prisoner expelled from France to Algeria, a country now viewed from a Europeanized perspective and with a sense of cultural shock. The film raises questions about humanity and transnational migratory flows in an unobtrusive, semidocumentary style. Dernier maquis (Final Resistance) (2008) is a factory-set film of considerable visual beauty that raises issues of Islamic identity in the beur community.

Moving away from personal evocations of the lives of second-generation North Africans in such banlieue films, Ameur-Zaïmeche has more recently explored ambivalent or scorned figures from popular and religious mythologies, in period costume films that combine adventure, drama, thriller, and biography. To do this, he has largely relied on actors of Maghrebi descent acting out roles performed differently from the naturalistic style associated with the second-generation Maghrebi—or beur—characters they have typically portrayed. Smugglers’ Songs (2011) is centered on the legacy of Mandrin, an 18th-century French highwayman, and the ways his fellow smugglers operated under the noses of the royal guards in order to maintain his legacy, as well as organized the publication of his biography. The Story of Judas (2015) explores the progressive changes in Judas (played by Ameur-Zaïmeche) prior to his betrayal of Jesus (Nabil Djedouani), while Terminal Sud (2019), set in an unnamed country under an oppressive regime, depicts a doctor (Ramzi Bedia) who seeks to save lives but becomes trapped by a seemingly omniscient power.

AMIN, MERVAT (1946–)

Born in Minya, Egypt, Amin came to fame playing opposite Abdel Halim Hafez in the phenomenally successful My Father Is Up the Tree (Hussein Kamal, 1969). She was part of a new generation of stars that also included Nur El-Sherif, Mahmud Yassin, and Hussein Fahmy, to the last of whom she was married from 1974 to 1986. Amin was a major presence in Egyptian cinema throughout the 1970s and 1980s and has made occasional appearances since. Among her most notable films are Adrift on the Nile (Kamal, 1971); the seminal New Realist work The Bus Driver (Atef El-Tayeb, 1982); Wife of an Important Man (Mohamed Khan, 1987), with Ahmed Zaki; and the film that marked Omar Sharif’s return to Egypt, The Puppeteer (Hani Lashin, 1989).

AMIRALAY, OMAR (1944–2011)

The progenitor of modern Syrian documentary filmmaking, Amiralay was born in Damascus to an Ottoman military officer and a Lebanese woman. During the 1960s, he studied in Paris, first painting and drama at the Théâtre des Nations, then cinema at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. The unrest of May 1968 led him to reject fictional cinema, and his first (student) film was a documentary report on street protestors. Upon his return to Syria, Amiralay was hired to direct documentaries for the National Film Organization, but when his second and third films were banned by the Censor Board, he ceased working for the state and became an independent filmmaker.

To date, only Amiralay’s first film has been screened publicly in Syria. Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) documents the Ba‘th Party’s modernization project, comparable to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Aswan project in Egypt, to construct a series of dams across major Syrian rivers in order to facilitate water distribution (especially irrigation) and provide rural areas with electricity. The flooding of ancient, low-lying villages and the resettlement of their inhabitants onto higher ground are depicted affirmatively, in the style of Soviet visionary Dziga Vertov. Amiralay’s subsequent documentaries deploy techniques more akin to socialist realism—toward much different ends. Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974) and The Chickens (1977) critique the detrimental effects of industrial modernization on the peasantry.

Realizing that alternative exhibition venues would be necessary for this kind of filmmaking, Amiralay helped found the Damascus Cinema Club along with Mohammad Malas, with whom he and Oussama Mohammad would later codirect Shadows and Light, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994), a documentary homage to the pioneer of Syrian cinema that is also an ode to filmmakers who have suffered from censorship. The trio then made Moudaress (1996), a documentary about the poet, novelist, and painter Fateh al-Moudaress, former secretary-general of the Syrian Syndicate for the Visual Arts.

After government suppression increased in Syria following the 1979 Camp David Accords, Amiralay went into exile in France, directing documentaries for television about sociopolitical conditions and events in Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine–Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Amiralay first returned to Syria in 1991, yet he was equally at home in Beirut and Damascus and carries dual nationality. His Lebanese films include On a Day of Ordinary Violence, My Friend Michel Seurat . . . (1996), which concerns the abduction of a French sociologist who died in captivity during the so-called Western hostage crisis in the 1980s, and The Man with the Golden Soles (2000), which critically pursues charismatic former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, who spearheaded the reconstruction projects of postwar Lebanon, and whose assassination in 2005 radically affected the political landscape of Lebanon and precipitated renewed violence.

Returning to Syria, seemingly with the goal of establishing an Arab film school in cooperation with Denmark, Amiralay directed a “corrective” to Film-Essay entitled A Flood in Baath Country (2003), in which the devastating effects of the Euphrates Dam project on the small village of Al-Mashi are exposed through interviews with villagers and state functionaries, juxtaposed to reveal as dissimulation the government propaganda that has continued to laud rural industrial development. Although Flood was also banned in Syria, pirated DVDs have, according to Amiralay, been distributed widely throughout the country.

ANIMATION

Animated film is widely made and appreciated in the Middle East, though the vast majority of such work is not well known outside the region, partly because of a dearth, until very recently, of scholarly analysis and of training opportunities. In Iran, the art of animation cinema started during the late 1950s through the efforts of Esfandiar Ahmadieh, who made the first Iranian animated film, the very short experimental Molla Nasreddin (1957), and graphic artist and animator Noureddin Zarrinkelk, who founded the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, along with graphic designer Morteza Momayez and illustrators, designers, and artists such as Farshid Mesghali and Ali Akbar Sadeghi. The first Tehran International Animation Festival screened 488 animation titles, both domestic and international, while the second festival (2001) saw 35 foreign countries submitting their films for screening in addition to Iranian entries. Renowned Iranian animators include Abdollah Alimorad, Abolfazl Razani, Akbar Alemi, Ebrahim Forouzesh, Saeed Tavakkolian, and Nahid Shamsdoost. Animation films and animators are well supported by the Iranian government, which backs courses in various animation styles and techniques such as silhouette animation, Claymation, puppetry and stop-motion, watercolor, and yarn objects at major universities, including Tehran University, Arts University, Islamic Azad University, and the Islamic School of Cinema. The Little World of Bahador (Alimorad, 2000) invests animation with political allegory through the story of a group of brave mice, under the leadership of Bahador, who depose a cruel and tyrannical king to secure their freedom. The exilic Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi’s graphic-novel-turned-animated-feature Persepolis (2007), a French coproduction, was initially banned in Iran due to its alleged misrepresentation of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The government subsequently relented, and the film has had limited screenings in Tehran, with scenes with sexual content deleted. The film’s fame has not been mirrored by other Iranian animations, but one noteworthy recent title is Kainoush Dalvand’s feature Battle of Kings (2012), which tells the story of Rostam and Sohrab, one of the most famous episodes of the Shahnameh.

Early instances of Turkish animation include Cemal Nadir Güler’s attempt to animate his character Amca Bey (“Mr. Uncle”) during the 1940s, a short animation film made in a student workshop academy organized by Vedat Ar at the Istanbul State Fine Art School, and the animated feature Once Upon a Time (Yüksel or Yalçın Ünsal, 1951)—purportedly completed, but its only print lost when sent to the United States for postproduction. Turkish animation began regular production during the 1960s, largely at Vedat Ar’s Filmar studio, which created animated commercials for various companies as well as cultural productions about famous Turks and Turkish historical figures for banks. Animation became a category at the Hisar Short Film Festival in 1970, and important animations of the period include Censor (Tan Oral, 1969), which criticized the censorship of art, and How the Ship of Creed Sailed (Tonguç Yaşar, 1969), an attempt at animating Ottoman calligraphy. The first animation department in Turkey was opened in 1984 at Eskişehir Anadolu University. Since the 1980s, Turkish State Television (TRT) and the Ministry of Culture have supported animation productions, especially those intended for children. In 2008, the first local children’s television channel, TRT Çocuk, was founded by TRT, and the channel started supporting various local animation series, including Pepee (Özhan Oda, 2008‒2015) and Rafadan Tayfa (2014–). A new regulation in 2011 also forced the international children’s channels operating in Turkey to air at least 20 percent locally produced content. Such developments have created a steep rise in the animation sector, and since 2009 feature-length animation films have also been released regularly in film theaters, including RGG Ayas (Düşyeri Animation Studios, 2014), Bad Cat (Mehmet Kurtulus/Ayse Ünal, 2016), and a feature-length film version of Rafadan Tayfa (Ismail Fidan, 2013).

The history of Egyptian animation begins with the films of the Frenkel brothers, Salomon, David, and Herschel, whose protagonist, Mish-Mish Effendi, was introduced in Nothing to Do (1936) and appeared in several sequels. In 1960, Ali Muhib and his brother, Husam, started an animation section within the Egyptian national television channel, and in 1962, Ali Muhib directed The White Line, which mixes animation and live action; he later directed the first Arab animation film series, Mishgias Sawah (1979), which ran for 30 episodes. Noshi Iskandar, a caricaturist, directed One and Five, a trilogy of films on the Six-Day War and the Defeat; Is It True?, Abd and Al, and Question (all 1969); and Excellent (1975), a critique of corruption. Other important figures are Ihab Shaker (The Flower and the Bottle [1968]); Radhà Djubran (Story of a Brat [1985]; The Lazy Sparrow [1991]); Abdellaim Zaki, who directed a considerable number of animated commercials; Mohamed Ghazala, also an educator and historian of the subject (Carnival [2001]; Crazy Works [2002]; HM [2005]); and two women, CalArts-trained Mona Abou El Nasr (Survival [1988]) and Zeinab Zamzam (A Terra-Cotta Dream [1997]; Open Your Eyes [2000]), who has produced a large number of mostly Islamic-themed animations using old-fashioned claymation techniques. Egypt witnessed an expansion of animation facilities during the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to programs at universities, such as the one started by Ghazala at Minya University, there are at least 10 significant animation studios—including Abou El Nasr’s Cairo Cartoon Studio and Zamzam’s Zamzam Media—operating and producing animations for television, commercials, and the occasional short film. Much of this material is shown in other parts of the Arab world, and some are coproductions with Gulf states. Since the Arab Uprisings, mostly brief political animations distributed online have offered a place for expression relatively free of censorship and self-censorship in Egypt, as they have done in much of the Arab world.

Animation is also a significant presence in Lebanese film and video, where university departments and courses in animation have notably been expanding. Lena Mehrej, who curated Lebanese animations for the Festival International de La Bande Dessinée, held in Beirut in 2003, has also been associated with Future TV, where Syrian-born, U.S.-educated Lina Ghaibeh has created most of her animation work and which periodically features short animations about political issues by Edgar Aho and Jad Khouri. Many Lebanese video artists employ animation techniques, particularly in conjunction with photographic or video material, evident in the work of Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Ali Cherri, Hisham Bizri, and Ziad Antar. Ely Dagher’s animated short Waves ’98, set against the background of the Lebanese Civil Wars, became the first Arab film to win the short film Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2015. Syrian animation, meanwhile, has been largely extinguished by the political crisis and violence there, with its erstwhile practitioners now either silenced or working outside the country—for example, Sulafa Hijazi (The Jasmine Birds [2009]). In Israel, in recent years, there has been considerable, well-funded development of digital technology, largely for intelligence purposes; however, the by-product of this has been a digital media boom that has facilitated film- and video-making by Israelis at lower production budgets, particularly animation, with the best-known and most widely distributed Israeli animation being the well-publicized hasbara film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). This feature-length war film analyzes an Israeli soldier’s struggle to come to terms with his participation in the Israel Defense Forces collaboration in the massive slaughter of Palestinians in the Sabra municipality and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982. The first Palestinian-produced animation film is Fatenah (Ahmad Habash, 2009). The Wanted 18 (Amer Somali/Paul Cowan, 2014), from the Zan Studio in Ramallah, is a hybrid live-action/animated documentary depicting a group of cows that is moved from a kibbutz to Bethlehem; it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was honored in Abu Dhabi. Animations produced by Zan and by Dimensions Studio, also Ramallah based, as well as by Zaitoon Studio, Afkartoon, Johatoon, and Shakhabeet Avatar—all Gaza based—have been referred to as examples of a “pixelated Intifada” for their role in projecting resistance to Israeli Occupation through critical appropriations of animation’s traditionally ludic phantasmagoria. Jordan’s two most prominent animators are Tariq Rimawi (Missing [2010]) and Mahmoud Hindawi (The Street Artist [2014]), both trained in Wales. Jordan has briefly hosted an animation festival, JoAnimate, focused on work from the region.

The first Algerian animation film, The Tree Party (1963), was the work of Mohamed Aram and is a plea to regrow vegetation destroyed in the just-finished war of liberation against France. Algeria hosted two animation festivals in 2012 and 2014, but Aram, who has continued to make films, mostly for television, remains the country’s only significant animator. Tunisian animation also began in the 1960s, through the pioneering work of Mongi Sancho (The Intelligent Dog [1966]). Originally self-taught, Sancho went on to study in Sofia at the Bulgarian National Center for Cinematography, where he made The Fez Seller in 1967; in the 1980s, Zouhair Mahjoub studied in Czechoslovakia, where he made The Water Seller (1984), a satirical critique of the Bourguiba regime. Both Sancho (Cunning Craftiness [2006]) and Mahjoub (The Carthage Submarine [1999]; The Miraculous Droplet [2009]) have remained active in the 21st century, joined by younger Tunisian animators such as Nadia Rais, previously an assistant to Mahjoub. Nacer Khemir began his work for the cinema as an animator, working in France in the early 1970s. Perhaps the most widely available examples of Maghrebi animation, however, are the animated sequences of Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (Nabil Ayouch, 1999), which provide an imagined better life for the street children of Casablanca. (Although they do not become part of the narrative world in the same way, the link by which animation provides an alternative environment for underprivileged children is also powerfully present in Ticket to Jerusalem [Rashid Masharawi, 2002], in which the protagonist screens animation films in Arabic to Palestinian children, many of them refugees.) The Meknès International Animation Festival (FICAM) begun in 2000, showing international work, but animation has received little support in Morocco. Hamid Semlali, who studied sculpture in Baghdad and film production in Prague, was perhaps the first significant figure there, making the shorts Didi, the Chicken (1984), Bobo, the Saviour (1988), Bobo and the Cheese (1990), and The Bird of the Atlas (2002), a rare example of an animated film that was partially funded by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain. Amine Beckoury’s Blad Skizo (2007), which uses plasticine characters, won Best African Short Film at FICAM in 2008; Beckoury subsequently completed Cuisine Jap (2010). The Maghreb is the setting for Azur and Asmar (2008) by well-established French animator Michel Ocelot, an early guest at FICAM. It tells the story of two boys, one French, one Maghrebi, who are separated by the independence struggle.

In the 21st century, as in other areas of the media, much funding and distribution of Arab animated films has originated with money and resources from the Gulf states, notably the Middle East Broadcasting Center Group in Dubai and the Cartoon Network Studios Arabia in Abu Dhabi. Animation series for distribution on the web now emanate from Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, where an animation course has been established at Effat University in Jeddah.

Iraqi-born, Germany-based Furat Al Jamil’s Baghdad Night (2013), the first Iraqi animation created by a woman, retells a folktale about a woman who lures a man into a graveyard. Iraqi-born, U.S.-based Usama Alshaibi’s five-minute digital animation Allahu Akbar (2003) uses complex and revolving geometric patterns similar to those traditionally used to represent the perfection of deity and as a substitute for the proscribed image of the Prophet in much Middle Eastern Islamic art and architecture. Paris-based, Moroccan-born Mounir Fatmi, who abandoned painting for the camera, includes somewhat similar digital animations in his work collected in Hard Head: Films of Mounir Fatmi (2008). By contrast, animation has played an important role in the orientalist portrayal of Arabs in Western films, from the world’s first feature-length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926), at least through the financially successful Disney-produced Aladdin (Ron Clements/John Musker, 1992). (The 2019 remake was a box-office flop.)

AOULAD-SYAD (OULAD SAYED), DAOUD (1953–)

A prolific French Moroccan screenwriter, filmmaker, producer (Les Films du Sud), and also renowned photographer, Aoulad-Syad was born in Marrakech, and his first short film, Mémoire ocre (1989), is an autobiographical account of his relationship with that city. Set in remote and forgotten places, many of Aoulad-Syad’s films explore the effects of time on his central characters. Often alienated, they are seen to wander around sparse landscapes, engaged in a quest for senses of self. Aoulad-Syad’s photographic work has greatly affected his framing of cinematic shots and his play with depth of field in nondescript environments. His Adieu forain (1998) evokes the dying world of three traditional entertainers traveling around rural Morocco with their funfair. The Wind Horse (2000), scripted by Ahmed Bouanani, narrates the story of two men trying to escape their past. Upon his release from the hospital, the younger man (Faouzi Bensaïdi) feels compelled to check whether his mother, who abandoned him as a child, is still alive, while the older man (Mohamed Majd), feeling unwelcome in his son’s home, decides to visit the grave of his beloved second wife. To make this journey, the two men use a motorbike and sidecar—a metaphor for the Pegasus of the title that can temporarily release them from their worldly burdens, until they finally realize that they cannot escape their destiny. Sound and image in this film often operate separately, with a narrator talking over fixed shots, including of walls, or other shots that evoke an enclosed space but are devoid of depth. Tarfaya (2004), the name of a seaside village across from the Canary Islands, follows Miriam, who arrives there from an unspecified location, determined to reach the Spanish border. In Tarfaya time stands still, and migration seems the only viable option for a range of isolated characters who, seeking solace and humanity, cross one another’s paths in a vast desert landscape.

Waiting for Pasolini (2007) is based on the conceit that when Italian auteur Pier Paulo Pasolini shot Oedipus Rex in Morocco in 1966, he befriended a man, Thami, who worked as an extra. Forty years later, when a new Italian film crew arrives, Thami expects to reencounter his friend. Based partly on a documentary, Ouarzarzate Movie (Ali Essafi, 2001), about extras working in and around Ouarzarzate, Waiting for Pasolini has been seen as a critique of neocolonialism in the Moroccan fim industry and transnational cinema. Drawing further on the relationship between everyday life and postcolonial cinema, The Mosk (2010) refers intertextually to Waiting for Pasolini and concerns the set of a mosque built for the earlier film that subsequently becomes the village mosque. Moha, the owner of the field on which the mosque was built as a set piece, now wants to reclaim his property, much to the dismay of the community. Subsequently, Aoulad-Syad has completed further features: Zmane Kenza and Sebate: The Shoe (both comedies made for Moroccan television in 2012) and The Desert Voices (2018).

AR, MÜJDE (1954–)

The daughter of a famous songwriter, Ar began her career as a model and theatrical performer before acting in a television series in 1974. While appearing in various genre films during the 1970s, including comedies, action-adventures, and melodramas, Ar became the paradigmatic star figure in the women’s films of the late Yeşilçam period. In these films, which focused on the social conditions of women in Turkey, Ar often portrayed strong female characters who try, despite patriarchal pressures, to achieve self-determination. Still active as a performer and television personality, Ar has since appeared as the stereotypical attractive passionate woman in Fahriye, the Older Sister (Yavuz Turgul, 1987) and My Aunt (Halit Refiğ, 1986) and as the enigmatic and unknowable woman of male fantasies in Atıf Yılmaz’s Her Name Is Vasfiye (1985) and Aaah Belinda (1986).

ARAB FILM DISTRIBUTION (AFD)

Located in Seattle, Washington, AFD (Typecast Films) is the largest distributor of Arab and Middle Eastern cinema in North America. Starting with five films in 1990 after the first-ever Arab film festival in the United States at the Goodwill Arts Games in Seattle, AFD’s inventory has since multiplied 100-fold to include features, documentaries, and short films from the Middle East, Maghreb, and South Asia, as well as exilic and diasporic Arab cinema produced in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Providing material available for sale and rental for home and institutional uses, and for the festival circuits, AFD remains one of the few dedicated sources in North America for Arab cinema.

ARAB UPRISINGS (ARAB SPRING)

This wave of mass protests that took place across the Arab region in 2010–2011 culminated 20 years of popular discontent with the dire socioeconomic effects of neoliberal structural-adjustment policies that had been implemented throughout much of the Middle East by military and autocratic regimes in the decades following the Cold War. In Tunisia (where the events are known as the Jasmine Spring), Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, despotic regimes were overthrown, with dictators either resigning or being removed from power, and in turn either being killed or imprisoned. However, in every case excepting Tunisia, where the forced resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January 2011 has been followed by a period of relatively peaceful revolution—although a subsequent economic slump has led to much disillusionment and resentment mainly among youth, particularly in the south—counterrevolutions or ongoing civil and military crises, often exacerbated by foreign interference, have all but negated the liberationist momentum. In Egypt, two years after the February 2011 resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist, was deposed in a coup staged by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In Yemen, the November 2011 deposing of President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been followed by a civil and military crisis in which, in response to the rebellion of Shi‘i Houthis from the north of the country, supported by Iran, an ongoing bombing campaign was launched by Saudi Arabia, with military support and encouragement from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, and the additional involvement of the United Arab Emirates. Saudi forces also assisted the conservative monarchy of Hamad ibn ‘Isa Al Khalifah in Bahrain in its suppression of protests that began there in March 2011. In Syria, also, President Bashar al-Assad has retained power amid a nearly decade-long civil and military crisis, notwithstanding attempts to remove him extending back to March 2011; the regime’s resilience has been attributed on the one hand to its socialist past and related historical alliance with the USSR/Russia, and on the other hand to its alliance along a non-Sunni Islamic axis with Iran.

Numerous films about, or set in the midst of, the Arab Uprisings have been made in the Middle East region. In Tunisia, many people in the film industry actively supported and participated in the January 2011 revolution. The period stirred up considerable activity in all areas of Tunisian cultural life, leading to the production of several documentaries that looked at Tunisian history-in-the-making. Noteworthy among them are Rouge parole (Elyes Baccar, 2011) and Fallega 2011: Candles in Al-Kasbah (Rafik Omrani, 2011). In the latter, the leaders of the revolution discuss and define the terms for analyzing their actions and any future engagements. In addition, well-known directors of feature films have turned to documentary in order to make postrevolutionary statements. These include Nadia El Fani (Laïcité Inch’Allah [2011], an exploration of secularism that led to El Fani being banned from entering Tunisia) and Kaouther Ben Hania (The Blade of Tunis [2013], an allegory of media hype and misinformation). Narrative features about the Tunisian uprisings are also prolific and include auteur vehicles Millefueille (Nouri Bouzid, 2013), which portrays two women’s search for gender equality following the revolution; Zizou / Spring Perfume (Férid Boughedir, 2016), about a rural migrant to the urban center who gains multiple perspectives on the revolution through his work in television satellite installation; the Bidoun series (Saad Jilani, 2012–2019), an exploration of youth rebelliousness under conditions of revolutionary change; and As I Open My Eyes (Leïla Bouzid, 2015), which examines the first stirrings of the uprising in Tunisia.

Elsewhere in the Maghreb, Algerian cinema has engaged the Arab Uprisings since their onset, a fact ever more salient in the face of the country’s April 2019 overthrow of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Sonia Chamkhi, for example, who like her Tunisian counterparts moved into documentary in the wake of the uprisings, made Militantes (2012), about women running for national office; while Karim Moussaoui directed Until the Birds Return (aka The Nature of Time) (2017), a narrative feature critiquing the limitations of individualism for revolutionary struggle. Earlier, in Morocco, activist filmmaker Nadir Bouhmouch directed Makhzen and Me (2011), a documentary that focuses on the February 2011 political reform movement in that country, where to date a revolution has not taken place. In the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, however, protests at the Gdeim Izik camp outside the capital El Ayoun in November 2010, which were suppressed by Moroccan forces, have been seen by some commentators as a precursor of the events of 2011.

Perhaps the internationally most spectacular site of the 2011 uprisings was Egypt, where short actualités of the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, shot on cellular phones and uploaded to the internet by individuals and by media activist groups like Mosireen, were able to circulate with relative freedom from censorship during the period, as has also been the case with short animations—this continues despite the increasingly close monitoring of social media and other communication channels by the Egyptian government, which has in fact capitalized on the proliferation of such films for the purpose of keeping up favorable international appearances by being perceived as allowing divergent viewpoints. Several documentaries were made during the revolutionary period, most of which received wide international viewership. These include Academy Award nominee The Square (Jehane Nujaim, 2013), which interweaves the experiences of three actors in the 2011 uprising—but was criticized heavily within Egypt for historical abstraction; 18 Days (2011), a well-funded omnibus film comprising shorts by Yousry Nasrallah, Marwan Hamed, Sherif Arafa, and several other well-known Egyptian directors, and featuring stars such as Yousra, Hend Sabri, and Bassem Samra; and another collectively directed film, Tahrir 2011: The Good, the Bad, and the Politician (Ayten Amin et al., 2011), which was banned in Egypt. Narrative features set in the context of the revolution include Clash (Mohamed Diab, 2016), an internationally well-received work set almost entirely inside a police van into which characters representing a typified array of classes and political factions have been corralled during a protest following the Morsi coup; Winter of Discontent (Ibrahim El Batout, 2012), a surreal look back at Mubarak-era repression, named after the titular 1962 John Steinbeck novel, and Egypt’s official entry to the 2014 Academy Awards; and In the Last Days of the City (Tamer El Said, 2016) and The Nile Hilton Incident (Tarek Saleh, 2017), both of which were banned in Egypt and have received comparatively less international attention. Since Sisi’s ascent to power, experimental films have been made that express revolutionary aspirations by less direct means, such as Crop (Johanna Domke/Marouan Omara, 2013) and Out on the Street (Jasmina Metwaly/Philip Rizk, 2015).

Like the representation of revolution in Egypt, cinematic depiction of the civil and military crisis in Syria has been circulated widely on social media, and several films have been made targeting Western audiences, some propagating military intervention through an emphasis on scenes of combat and indiscriminate bombing, of which the most widely distributed have been The White Helmets (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2016) and The Last Men in Aleppo (Ferras Feyyad, 2017). In this context, Oussama Mohammad’s Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (codirected with Wiam Simav Bedirxan, 2014) is noteworthy for its critical analysis of the Assad regime’s response to criticism and protest; while My Pink Room (Vachan Sharma, 2013) offers a sympathetic portrait of the conditions faced by Syrian refugees. Yemini films, too, have been made about the refugee crisis, for example, Yemen, the Silent War (Sufian Abulokon, 2018).

ARAFA, SHERIF (1960–)

This prolific Egyptian director collaborated with writer Wahid Hamid on a number of films, including Playing with Giants (1990), Terrorism and Kebab (1992), El-Mansi (1993), Birds of Darkness (1995), Sleeping in Honey (1996, about an impotency epidemic that strikes grooms on their wedding nights), and Edhak el-Sura Tetla‘ Helwa (Laugh and the Picture Will Turn Out Right [1998]), starring Ahmed Zaki. Terrorism and Kebab is a popular and very successful comedy that lampoons political corruption and social ineptitude. The following year, Arafa directed Al-Zaeem (The Leader/Boss), a widely popular stage drama again starring Adel Imam. Arafa also made a series of films written by Ahmed Abdallah that have become classic references both for their socially conscious story lines combined with popular humor and their star performers. These include The Headmaster (2000), Son of Wealth (2001), and Ful el-Seen el-Azeem (The Great Fava Beans of China [2004]), starring Mohamed El-Hinidi.

In 2006, Arafa directed the biopic Halim, about the popular singer Abdel Halim Hafiz, which, following the death of its lead actor, Ahmed Zaki, during filming, was completed by Zaki’s son. After directing two action movies, The Island (2007) and The Island 2 (2014), and a historical drama, The Treasure (2017), Arafa wrote and directed The Passage (2019), starring Ahmed Ezz and Hend Sabri and featuring music by composer Omar Khairat. Set during the war of attrition that followed the 1967 war in which Egyptian forces lost the Sinai to Israel in what became known as the Defeat, the film tracks a joint unit of special forces comprising Egyptian commandos and navy seals as they set about an operation to bomb an Israeli camp and rescue a group of Egyptian prisoners who are being held there. Artillery, weapons, and the training of actors were provided by the Egyptian Armed Forces Department of Morale Affairs. In 2019, Arafa was given the Faten Hamama Honorary Award for lifetime achievement at the Cairo International Film Festival.

ARAFAT, YASSER (YASIR; YASSIR) (1929–2004)

Founder of the Fateh political party in 1956, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004, and president and prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004, Abdel Rahman Abdel Ra’uf Arafat (known informally as Abu Ammar) was the most widely recognized persona of the Palestinian cause for his roles as guerrilla/freedom fighter, unofficial diplomat, political organizer, peace negotiator, and national leader. Sometimes credited as the father of the modern Palestinian nation, interpretations of his impact are controversial. Most of his onscreen appearances are in news footage, with the exception of documentaries in which he is the central subject. Anthony Geffen’s made-for-television The Faces of Arafat (1990) traces 40 years of Arafat’s personal and political life. Arafat’s last public interview was conducted by filmmaker Sherine Salama in The Last Days of Yasser Arafat (2006), a story about Salama’s months-long negotiations in obtaining the interview and reactions to Arafat in interviews with his associates and people who did not know him (cabdrivers, villagers, and Western journalists waiting for interviews). Arafat, My Brother (Rashid Masharawi, 2005) is an account of Arafat recounted by the leader’s estranged brother. Greetings to Kamal Jumblatt (Maroun Baghdadi, 1978) features an extended public speech by Arafat, in honor of assassinated Lebanese leftist Kamal Jumblatt, at its structural climax, while Trip Along Exodus (Hind Shoufani, 2014) examines political opposition to Arafat within Fateh through the figure of political intellectual Elias Shoufani.

ARBID, DANIELLE (1970–)

Arbid began her career as a broadcast journalist for European television in the early 1990s. That background enabled her to produce several insightful documentary critiques of Lebanon. Alone with the War (2000) follows Arbid through the streets of Beirut as she asks people, “Why isn’t there a monument dedicated to those who died in the war?” In one particularly powerful scene at Shatila refugee camp, she talks with several Palestinian children who tell her matter-of-factly that they are still finding bodies in the ground. Since then, Arbid has made several short documentaries with her Christian family that accentuate the everyday violence that haunts the postwar domestic sphere, including Conversation de Salon (2004). This theme gains powerful representation in her first narrative feature, In the Battlefields (2004). Arbid’s subsequent film, The Lost Man (2007), is a cross-cultural encounter between a French photographer and an Arab amnesiac that plumbs the seedy underground culture of Jordan. The film was banned in Lebanon because of its explicit sex scenes, as was Arbid’s subsequent Beirut Hotel (2011), because Lebanese authorities viewed it as a threat to Lebanon’s stability for its evocation of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in 2005. Arbid is currently based in France, which she now claims as home and where she has directed a semiautobiographical narrative feature, Parisienne (2015).

ARİF V 216 (2018)

An example of a franchise film comedy series developed by a major popular production company, similar to the Recep İvedik series, Arif V 216 (Kivanç Baruönü, Turkey, 2018), is the sequel to G.O.R.A. (Ömer Faruk Sorak, 2004) and A.R.O.G. (Ali Taner Baltacı/Cem Yılmaz, 2008). A rip-off of a character, Turist Ömer, created by the Yeşilçam star Sadri Alışık, especially in Tourist Ömer on the Star Trek (Hulki Saner, 1973), in all three films Arif (Cem Yılmaz) is a homegrown and witty Turkish character, much like Turist Ömer, who finds himself in space among aliens and robots. Concurrent with the boom in comedy films in recent decades, all three films topped the box office as the lead comedian/actor capitalized on the success of the formulaic story line.

ARKIN, CÜNEYT (1937–)

Trained as a doctor in Turkey, Arkın began acting after his good looks were noticed by a film director. During the mid-1960s, he played the handsome male lead in melodramas and romantic comedies, but he would accrue fame for his roles in later action and historical adventure films, westerns, karate films, and costume dramas. Like other stars of the high Yeşilçam period, Arkın acted in a very large number of films—in his case, almost 300. These included Turkified science-fiction films, in which he is depicted performing stunts in circus acts, fight sequences, and horseback-riding scenes. After starring in the Malkoçoğlu film series as an early Ottoman warrior hero, he continued to play similarly cartoonish characters, including Battal Gazi and Kara Murat, who fight and kill the enemies of the Turks or Ottomans, in action-adventure films. Arkın gained international attention for his lead role in The Man Who Saved the World (Çetin İnanç, 1982), a low-budget genre piece known as the Turkish Star Wars.

ARNA’S CHILDREN (2003)

Codirected by Juliano Mer and Dutch filmmaker Danniel Danniel, this vérité documentary analyzes the historical changes in conditions and perspectives that have occurred within Jenin refugee camp since Israel’s 2002 reinvasion of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Arna’s Children portrays the director’s mother, Arna, conducting educational theater workshops with the children of Jenin camp from 1989 to 1996. The film alternates between Arna’s educational sessions and interviews conducted several years later by Mer with former workshop participants, now grown and actively engaged in the conflict with Israel.

AROUND THE PINK HOUSE (1999)

Lebanese directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s first feature exemplifies the frustrations that many squatters faced at the end of the Lebanese Civil War, when the political economy shifted to accommodate newly mandated reconstruction projects. While developers stood to profit, squatters were lured into abandoning their homes for only modest compensation. The titular pink house is a large, heavily damaged mansion inhabited by two families. When its new owner announces his intention to remodel the house into a commercial center and gives the families 10 days to vacate the premises, the surrounding neighborhood divides between those who favor reconstruction and those who oppose it. Although technically awkward at times, the film effectively depicts postwar Beirut as a persisting battlefield, declaration of peace notwithstanding.

ARTEEAST

This nonprofit organization was established in 2003 in New York City by Israeli curator and educator Liva Alexander with the specific mission of presenting contemporary Middle Eastern art and artists to a wider audience, both internationally as well as in North America. ArteEast showcases the multicultural connections among the various Middle Eastern cultures and peoples while providing a forum for the Western world to sample the burgeoning diversity of Middle Eastern films, literature, music, and visual arts.

ASLI, MOHAMED (1957–)

Born in Casablanca, Asli studied in Milan, working as an assistant cameraman and assistant director, then a production executive. Returning to Morocco, he established, in 2003, a training facility in Ouzazarte within Kanzaman Studios in partnership with CinéCittà and the Luce Institute. Moroccans had been demanding such a school for decades, and Asli’s was the first. He made a documentary about the school in 2005.

Asli wrote, directed, and produced In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly (2004), Morocco’s first feature in Arabic and Berber. The film tackles the harsh lives of three waiters transplanted from their villages to Casablanca to work to try to support their families back home, a subject Asli treats with humor and respect. Rarely are Moroccan features shot in rural areas, and even more rarely are rural problems handled with the realism of Asli’s film. The three men are rendered as complex human beings endowed with desires that poverty makes almost impossible to realize. The film was honored as the first Moroccan movie since 1978 to be selected for the Week of the Critic at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2011, Asli made Rough Hands, about a barber who tries to facilitate work in Spain for his neighbor, but her hands are insufficiently rough to get her the job.

ATATÜRK, MUSTAFA KEMAL (1881–1938)

The founder and the first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (literally, “father of the Turks”) was born in Salonika, at that time part of the Ottoman Empire. After a military education, he served in various ranks in the Ottoman army before becoming a leader of the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923). As the president of Turkey from 1923 until his death, he led the creation of a modern, secular nation-state through a series of rigorous reforms.

The party he founded, the Republican People’s Party, represented the new republic’s six basic principles with an arrow on its logo. These connected and overlapping “Kemalist” principles were as follows: republicanism (the replacement of the monarchy with a constitutional republic); populism (social mobilization of the people to realize reforms); laicism (the French rendering of secularism, which introduces a separation of worldly and religious matters while giving control of religious affairs to the central state apparatuses); reformism (the replacement of old, traditional, and Ottoman elements with those of modern, republican ones and the belief in continual reform as necessary for progress); nationalism (the creation of a nation-state based on an imagined ethnicity); and statism (the creation of economic modernization and industrialization through state measures and institutions). As a blueprint for the Republic of Turkey, Kemalism included the adoption of the Western, positivist understanding of science and education. In time, however, some of these fundamentals lost their power, especially as contemporary Turkey has integrated into global capitalist markets. Current renderings of Kemalist ideology often draw on the secular, democratic character of the nation-state with some nationalist undertones.

Since Atatürk’s death, the filming of his life has been a hotly contested issue in Turkish cinematic circles. In a 1989 book concerning the issue, Metin Erksan claimed that a film on Atatürk could not be made in Turkey because the concept of Atatürk would inevitably be concretized, thus limiting the people’s freedom to imagine him. Erksan instead called for “a big and real American filmmaker, such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, or George Lucas,” to direct such a film, on grounds that Hollywood filmmaking, so well rehearsed in constructing myths and legends, was more suited to projecting an ideal image.

Nonetheless, Turkish filmmakers did indeed make films about Atatürk, although for years not a single feature focused primarily on him. That task was left to a 2008 feature-length docudrama, Mustafa (2008), directed by television journalist Can Dündar. Released on the 70th anniversary of Atatürk’s death and seen by 1.1 million people, Mustafa was criticized for its televisual language and its attention to the late leader’s private life. Other works featuring Atatürk include the film and the television series Tired Warrior (Halit Refiğ, 1979), which narrates the Turkish War of Independence; the film Republic (Ziya Öztan, 1998) and the television series Metamorphosis (Feyzi Tuna, 1992), both of which focus on the foundation and early years of the Turkish Republic; the television documentary The Yellow Zeybek (Can Dündar, 1993), about Atatürk; and the feature The Last Ottoman Yandım Ali (Mustafa Şevki Doğan, 2007), a love story involving a late Ottoman bully who meets with Atatürk.

AVANTI POPOLO (1986)

This independent Israeli feature was innovative as well as controversial for its placement of Arab characters at the center of its drama and for having them speak their native Arabic. Directed by Rafi Bukai, Avanti Popolo outdoes its Young Israeli Cinema contemporaries with a fantastical, post-bourekas story of two Egyptian soldiers, played by Palestinian Israeli actors, who become separated from their combat unit following the Six-Day War. As Khaled and Ghassan navigate their way home to Egypt, they chance upon a dead United Nations soldier in a jeep, which they steal and drive through the Sinai desert until it runs out of fuel. The theatrical, comedic performance of Khaled/Salim Dau—who would later feature in Cup Final (Eran Riklis, 1991), Curfew (Rashid Masharawi, 1993), James’ Journey to Jerusalem (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, 2003), and the television series Arab Labor (Shay Capon/Jacob Goldwasser/Ron Ninio, 2007‒2013)—is ironized as he and his comrade are overtaken by a hapless Israeli patrol with whom they end up marching through the desert singing the titular Italian communist anthem. The two Egyptians eventually evade their captors but are killed accidentally by their own comrades, who mistake them for the enemy. The absurd quality of Avanti Popolo renders it a parable that reflexively allegorizes Israeli alienation and self-destructiveness while nostalgically sentimentalizing class solidarity across the Arab–Israeli divide. See also ISRAELI OCCUPATION.

AVŞAR, HÜLYA (1963–)

After a brief stint as a professional swimmer, Avşar won Miss Turkey of 1982, from which she was later disqualified because her forbidden divorced marital status was discovered. Avşar turned to cinema: becoming a sex symbol throughout the 1980s, she played women spanning the moral spectrum in genre films such as Call Girls (Osman Seden, 1985) and Guilty Youth (Orhan Elmas, 1985). She acted subsequently in post-Yeşilçam films such as Berlin in Berlin (Sinan Çetin, 1993), as a Turkish migrant worker, and Mrs. Salkım’s Diamonds (Tomris Giritlioğlu, 1999), in which she plays a member of a non-Muslim ethnic minority. However, the dissolution of Yeşilçam compelled Avşar to seek additional work in the music and television industries. She has recorded several albums and remained active in her later career as a television host and a film, theater, and television actor.

AYOUCH, NABIL (1969–)

Of Moroccan ancestry, Ayouch was raised in France, mostly in the Paris suburbs (banlieues) populated by immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, but has been living primarily in Morocco since the mid-1990s. Ayouch studied theater in Paris but began training on film projects rather than attending a school. From 1992, he made commercials for Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa and several shorts. In 1997, he directed his first feature, Mektoub, a detective “road movie” based on a true story that exposes the abuse of power, corruption, and social inequality within Moroccan society and the hashish trade. In this tale, a young woman attending a conference in Tangiers with her husband is kidnapped and raped by powerful men but rebuilds her marital relationship during a trip to the south of Morocco. Immensely popular at the Moroccan box office and in France, the film officially represented Morocco at the 1999 Academy Awards. In that year, Ayouch set up his production company, Ali’N Production, in Casablanca, and for several years produced a television series, Lalla Fatima, while also establishing several venues through which Moroccan youth could produce short films.

Ayouch’s second feature, Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (2000), set on the streets and docksides of Casablanca, broke box office records. His One Minute Less of Sunshine (2002), a thriller in a style similar to Mektoub, was denied release in Morocco due to sexually explicit scenes featuring a transvestite protagonist. A subsequent “road movie,” Whatever Lola Wants (2006), continues this critical integration of gender and sexuality issues, this time on an international scale. Shot in Morocco but set largely in Cairo, it concerns an American woman who, having studied belly dancing with a gay Egyptian living in the United States, goes to Cairo in an attempt to reconcile with her estranged Egyptian boyfriend but finds herself searching for the famed but reclusive belly dancer Ismahan instead.

Much Loved (2015) created a huge controversy in Morocco, where it was banned because of its subject matter: the prostitution of Moroccan women in clubs that cater to wealthy patrons, mostly from the Gulf states. The fiction depicts sympathetically the tough lives of four such women, who rely on group solidarity to overcome the stigma they must endure while coping with family responsibilities. His next film, Razzia (2017), set mostly on the streets of Casablanca and covering the years from the 1980s to 2015, focuses on the lives of five protagonists from different backgrounds, all of whom must struggle against a repressive government. Ayouch uses references to the classic Hollywood film Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)—none of which was shot in Morocco—to self-reflexively juxtapose romantic ideals with harsh reality.