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BAB EL-OUED CITY (1994)

Set during the 1988 riots against austerity measures imposed by the Algerian government to offset collapsing oil prices and currency devaluations, Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-Oued City is the story of Boualem, a young baker so tortured by incessant religious harangues from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque that he tears one down from the roof of the bakery. Depicted through extended flashback and framed by letters written to him by his sympathetic lover, Yamina, once he has left the country, Boualem’s act spurs a variety of retributions, especially by an Islamist militia that considers it blasphemous. The film’s layered plot and visual structure, however, help construct a sense of fear and anxiety that allegorizes the militants—whose leader is Yamina’s brother—to a larger, shadowy enterprise of national consolidation and control, and that finally compels the socialistically minded Boualem to escape to France. French is spoken at points throughout the film by characters associated with the militia and former French colons. The film was shot in secret during the civil strife that occurred in the wake of the 1988 riots.

BABAÏ, BRAHIM (1936–2003)

Babaï graduated from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in 1963, worked for French and Tunisian television, then moved into filmmaking with shorts, documentaries, and finally features. His films are examples of a neorealist cinema of engagement, representing an attempt to reach a wide range of viewers and offer accessible solutions to social problems in Tunisia. His first feature, And Tomorrow? (1971–1972), adapted from Abdelkader Ben Cheikh’s novel, is one of the first Tunisian films to investigate issues of social concern during the 1960s, such as rural exodus, unemployment, and famine. The story follows three rural farmers who leave their drought-stricken village for the city. Babaï’s much later The Night of the Decade (1991), adapted from Mohamed Salah Jerbi’s novel, is a political crime intrigue depicting the Algerian unionization crisis that erupted in violence during the late 1970s. Its story is told through the lens of several students caught up in events. An Odyssey (2001–2004), inspired by Abdelaziz Belkhodja’s novel The Ashes of Carthage and considered Tunisia’s first film in the thriller genre, offers a critical perspective on transnational trafficking in art and cultural objects.

BAB’AZIZ (THE PRINCE WHO CONTEMPLATED HIS SOUL) (2005)

See DESERT TRILOGY.

BACCAR, SELMA (1945–)

Born in Tunis, Baccar studied cinematography in Paris and became the first Tunisian woman to direct a narrative feature film in that country: Fatma 75 (1976) explores contradictions between traditional and modern aspects of Tunisian society and culture, highlighting celebrated women and other eminent figures of the Berber independence movement. Her second directorial feature, Dance of Fire (1994), dedicated to the memory of a Jewish Tunisian singer of the 1920s, continues Baccar’s interest in the representation of Tunisian women. It introduces the singer at the peak of her popularity and recounts her activities during that period, from her celebrated salon in Tunis through her travels to Europe to her return and untimely death—a crime of passion—in 1927. Her third feature, Flower of Forgetfulness, was released in 2005. Baccar has also made documentaries and is the first female producer in Tunisia. In 1979, she coauthored a manifesto in support of Arab women filmmakers with Egyptian film historian Magda Wassef and Lebanese director Heiny Srour (Leila and the Wolves).

BACHIR-CHOUIKH, YAMINA (1954–)

Algerian Yamina Bachir-Chouikh worked at the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques, serving as a scriptwriter for Omar Gatlato (Merzak Allouache, 1976) and Sand Wind (Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, 1982). She has worked as an editor and screenwriter on several additional Algerian films, including The Citadel (1988) and The Ark of the Desert (1997), both directed by her husband, Mohamed Chouikh. Her first directorial feature, Rachida (2002), concerns a young teacher shot by terrorists when she refuses to place a bomb in her school. Miraculously, she survives but, unsafe in Algiers, moves with her mother to a house in the countryside, where she attempts to build a new life, again as a teacher, only to experience Islamist violence there too. Despite this, she refuses to bow to, or reciprocate, the violence, and the film ends as, the day after a murderous attack on the village, she reenters her wrecked schoolroom, accompanied by some of her pupils. Rachida was made during a period in which Algerian filmmaking had almost ceased in the face of the civil conflict; its psychological insight and portrayal of female solidarity and oppression make it one of the most significant Algerian films of the century to date. It is also the first 35-mm feature film directed by a woman ever to have been shot in Algeria. In 2010, Bachir-Choukih directed a documentary, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, about the role of women in the national liberation movement, and she edited her daughter Yasmine Chouikh’s first film, Until the End of Time (2017), a romantic drama that won the Best First Feature award at the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou in 2019.

BADIE, MUSTAPHA (1928–2001)

A filmmaker and actor originally named Arezki Berkouk, Mustapha Badie worked in the Arab municipal theater group of Algiers and received training at the Radiodiffusion Télévision Française during the colonial era, then found work at Emissions en Langues Arabe et Kabyle with Radio-Alger. His activities in support of Algerian liberation led to his arrest and imprisonment from 1957 until independence. Upon his release, he resumed his career under the name Mustapha Badie. His films, usually based on historical events, include Our Mothers (1963) and The Night Is Afraid of the Sun (1966), an epic feature in the tradition of Chronicle of the Years of Embers (Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, 1975), depicting various aspects of Algerian society and culture between 1952 and 1962 in four tableaux (The Land Is Thirsty, The Roads to Prison, History of Saliha, and History of Fatma).

BADRAKHAN, AHMED (1909–1969)

At a time when Egypt had no film industry to speak of, Badrakhan wrote articles about cinema for the periodicals Al-Sabah and Magalaty, before moving to France in 1931 to study film under the patronage of Talaat Harb. He returned in 1934 to become the first Egyptian director of Harb’s Studio Misr. He was in many respects a director of “firsts”: he wrote the screenplay for the first film produced by Studio Misr, entitled Wedad (1936)—likewise the first film to star Umm Kulthum. (Badrakhan also partially directed this film, but following a dispute, Fritz Kramp took over.) Quickly, however, he became known as the director of Umm Kulthum’s films, all musicals: Song of Hope (1937), Dinars (1940), Aïda (1942), and Fatma (1947). He was also the first to film singers Farid al-Atrache and Asmahan (in Triumph of Youth [1940]) and actress Mariam Fakhr Eddin (Night of Love [1951]). He also directed two important biopics: Mustafa Kamel (1952) and Sayed Darwish (1966). Mustafa Kamel, which tells the life story of the young nationalist who led the 1919 revolt, is credited as the first film to depict the national struggle for independence against the British and was denied screening until after the Free Officers coup of 1952. With Sayed Darwish, Badrakhan sets the story of the eponymous composer against the backdrop of anti-British demonstrations, in which the young Darwish actively participates, rebelling against his religious schooling in pursuit of his talent, and falling in love with a dancer (Hind Rustom).

Badrakhan’s With God on Our Side (completed in 1953 but released in 1955 due to problems with the censors) depicts the events leading up to the Free Officers coup and was filmed shortly following that event. It tells the story of a young officer, Ahmed (Emad Hamdi), who loses an arm because of defective weapons used by Egypt in the 1948 war in Palestine. The film condemns those who were responsible and who collaborated with the British and the ruling monarchy, including Ahmed’s own uncle, Abdel Aziz Pasha (Mahmoud El-Miligi). Both Badrakhan’s historical/nationalistic films and his romantic-musical melodramas were filled with sentiment, the protagonists often sacrificing for a greater good or for the sake of their loved ones. His son, Ali Badrakhan, has also become an important director in Egypt.

BADRAKHAN, ALI (1946–)

Son of Ahmed Badrakhan, Ali Badrakhan began his career as an assistant director with his father and, later, to Fatin Abdel-Wahab, Youssef Chahine, and Ahmad Diauddin. Devoid of his father’s romanticism, his own films were deeply political, often scathing in their criticism of figures of power and corruption. With Karnak (1975), Badrakhan levels his criticism against Nasserism, while in Shafika and Metwally (1978), he depicts the construction of the Suez Canal and those who betrayed Egypt during the colonial era. In People on the Top (1981), based on a story by Naguib Mahfouz, Nur El-Sherif plays a petty thief who is released from jail to become a rich businessman. The film portrays the new social class that emerged as a result of Anwar Sadat’s opening of the country to Western capitalist policies (the Infitah). Personal greed and corruption at the expense of the greater good are likewise emphasized in Hunger (1986), set in the unspecified 19th-century past but clearly commenting on present-day social ills. Based on the novel The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz, the film tells the story of a donkey cart transporter, Farag El-Gibali (Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz), who stands up to local bullies and is consequently granted fetewwa status (power and authority to protect and manage local affairs). As he is seduced into a hedonistic relationship with a rich woman, Malak (Yousra), however, he abandons his family and grows increasingly selfish, becoming so negligent of the people’s needs and interests that they resort to looting his stash of supplies and ousting him. Badrakhan explored the specific social circumstances of his characters. He was the last director to work with star Souad Hosni, in The Shepherd and the Women (1991), based on an Italian play titled Crime on Goat Island, and which also starred Yousra and Ahmad Zaki. Badrakhan’s last film to date features Nadia al-Gindi and Ilham Shahin in an adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, titled simply Desire (2002).

BAGHDADI, MAROUN (1951–1994)

Perhaps the most prominent filmmaker of the Lebanese Civil War era, Baghdadi had the versatility to make documentary films politically entrenched within the conflict while also directing narrative films capable of transcending national borders. After studying political science at the Sorbonne in Paris, he became involved with a leftist political coalition, the Lebanese National Movement (LMN). Baghdadi directed several short documentaries for the LMN, including a portrait of the coalition’s leader, Druze patriarch Kamal Jumblatt. He also directed several documentaries and fictional films about Lebanon for European television. His films remain closely concerned with the political violence and social limitations facing the country. Beirut, Oh Beirut (1975), featuring Egyptian actor Izzat el Alaili, offers a prophetic vision of Lebanon’s troubled future by following four central characters as they confront fantasies about its cosmopolitan capital city. Little Wars (1982) revisits the beginning of the civil war in a tale about the role played by traditionalism and family honor in pulling into war a generation that did not want it, while also denaturalizing the sensationalism of war by depicting the role played by journalists, both Western and Lebanese, in creating this popular perspective.

Capable of straddling Arab and European sensibilities, Baghdadi’s films appealed consistently to audiences in Europe while relying on French funding. During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, he participated in Wim Wenders’s experimental film Room 666 (1982), in which a series of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg and Jean-Luc Godard, are asked whether they believe cinema is a dying language. One of two non-Western filmmakers featured, Baghdadi replies that filmmaking is a vicious cycle requiring the director to surrender life to the screen. The implied ambivalent relationship with representational power is a recurrent trope within Baghdadi’s films—and Lebanese cinema generally. Similarly, Out of Life (1990), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, provides a gripping story about the abduction of a French photojournalist during the civil war, in which the photojournalist’s bravado serves as a reflexive critique. Baghdadi died prematurely from an accidental fall at his home in Beirut.

BAHRAIN

Bahrain is an island state monarchy located in the Persian/Arabian Gulf off the east coast of Saudi Arabia, to which it is connected by a road bridge, and also lies to the northwest of Qatar across the Gulf. Like most countries on the Arabian Peninsula, Western oil companies produced some of the first documentaries in and on Bahrain. Once a major trade route stop because of its fresh water supply, Bahrain was the first Arab Gulf country in which oil was discovered, in 1931, making it the culture and business center of the Gulf during the British colonial period. Today, Bahrain has been depleted of oil and does not have the wealth of its neighbors. The failure to distribute wealth on the part of the Al Khalifa royal family has led to mass protests by citizens, predominantly the disempowered Shi‘i majority that has been brutally repressed, particularly during and since the Arab Uprisings. Narrative filmmaking arrived in Bahrain around the time of independence, with the Wonderful World of Disney’s production of Hamad and the Pirates: The Phantom Dhow (Roy Edward Disney, 1971), produced in collaboration with Shaikh Isa bin Sulman Al Khalifah, ruler of Bahrain. With its colorful images of dhows and the sea, the film was screened at Bahraini schools ostensibly to educate students about indigenous culture. The film was narrated by Syrian American actor Michael Ansara and starred Khalifa Shaheen, performing the role of the pirate captain, who went on to direct several documentaries, including Pictures of an Island (1981) and People on the Horizon (1983).

To support and facilitate local production, the Bahrain Cinema Company was established in 1967 and the Bahraini Film Production Company in 1980. Aspiring filmmakers, including Bassam Al-Thawadi, made short narrative and documentary films during the 1970s, then went on to direct narrative features. One such work, Four Girls (Hussain Abbas Al-Hulaybi, 2007), about for young women trying to start a business, opened the inaugural Gulf Film Festival in Dubai in 2008. Al-Hulaybi’s later film Longing (2010) addresses the social tension that developed in Bahrain during the 1980–1981 Iran‒Iraq War, through a Sunni–Shi‘a romance. Recent Bahraini features include The Sleeping Tree (Muhammed Buali, 2014), about a young girl with epilepsy.

As in the other Gulf states, commercial cinemas predominantly screen a mix of Indian, Egyptian, and Hollywood films. The presence of South Asians in Bahraini film testifies to historical and contemporary, cultural, political, and economic connections between Bahrain, India, and Pakistan. Moonlight (Ajith Nair, 2010) and The Metro (Bipin Prabhakar, 2011), both directed by Indians, concern the Malayali migrant community in Bahrain. Saudi-born and Bahrain-based Pakistani filmmaker Zeeshan Jawed Shah has supervised horror and horror-comedy genre films with student filmmakers: Paranorma: There Is Always a Dark Side (2011), Gilgamesh Pearl (2011), Silveraven (2012), and Dead Sands (2013). He has also worked with director Saleh Sharif on Bits of What I Have (2015), shot in Turkey, in Turkish, about an anguished writer.

BAKRI, MOHAMMED (1953–)

Born in Bina, a village in the Galilee, Bakri studied acting and literature at Tel Aviv University. He began his career as a theatrical performer in 1976, in Israel and the West Bank, followed by film acting in 1983, appearing in productions by renowned Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers Amos Gitai and Michel Khleifi. He eventually gained lead roles in Israeli, Palestinian, and European films, including Beyond the Walls (Uri Barabash, 1984), Esther (Gitai, 1986), Cup Final (Eran Riklis, 1991), Haifa (Rashid Masharawi, 1996), Yom, Yom (Gitai, 1998), Private (Saverio Constanzo, Italy, 2004), Laila’s Birthday (Masharawi, 2008), Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, 2013), and Wajib (Annemarie Jacir, 2017). Bakri is one of few Palestinian artists with a successful career in both Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic theater and cinema, often dealing with aspects of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and internal Palestinian struggles. He has also directed several documentaries, including 1948 (1998), a Palestinian interpretation of the Nakba; the more controversial Jenin, Jenin (2002), initially banned in Israel and based on Palestinian residents’ interpretations of violent clashes with the Israel Defense Forces in Jenin during the Al-Aqsa Intifada; Since You’ve Been Gone, an elegy to famed Palestinian author Emile Habibi; and Zahara (2009), a history of Palestine as told through the perspective of a woman whose life traverses the pre- and post-Nakba eras. Bakri’s son, Saleh, is also an actor in Palestinian and Israeli films, having appeared alongside his father in Wajib and Laila’s Birthday as well as in Salt of This Sea (Jacir, 2008), The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009), When I Saw You (Jacir, 2012), and the hasbara vehicle The Band’s Visit (Eran Kolirin, 2007).

BANDIT, THE (1996)

This extremely popular film of the post-Yeşilçam era (2.5 million spectators), directed by Yavuz Turgul, is considered the first financially successful production, which, as such, instigated the domestic success of contemporary Turkish cinema. The Bandit thus heralded the rejuvenation of Turkish cinema and the arrival of the new Turkish cinema, even while remaining in direct contact with Yeşilçam—to which the film stands nonetheless as a critical homage. Its story concerns a thief who, upon release from a 35-year prison term, searches Istanbul for his former lover. In the course of his quest, he observes the immense social transformation that has occurred in Turkey since his internment and comes to the conclusion that his former relationship could never be revived under present conditions. As a result, by film’s end, he commits suicide.

BANI-ETEMAD, RAKHSHAN (1954–)

Born in Tehran, Bani-Etemad is often described as Iran’s leading female director. She graduated with a degree in film direction from the University of Tehran and started her career making documentaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. Bani-Etemad’s feature film credits include Off Limits (1986), Nargess (1992), The Blue Veiled (1995), The May Lady (1998), Baran and the Native (1999), Under the City’s Skin (2001), Our Times (2002), Gilaneh (2005), and Main Line (2006). She has focused on issues faced by the impoverished and the underprivileged classes, even the criminal element, in contemporary Iran, with female characters usually depicted as resistors and survivors of hostile social situations.

In Nargess, the first film in Bani-Etemad’s City Trilogy, an older woman loses her much younger lover to the younger Nargess. Bani-Etemad turns this unusual love triangle (two of the characters are professional thieves, and Nargess is abjectly poor) not only into an exploration of two women victimized by a selfish and immature man but also into a critical appraisal of the strictly codified and patriarchal postrevolutionary Iranian society, where to move from the criminal class to the impoverished but respectable working class involves not only deception but incest.

The City Trilogy continues with the self-reflexive The May Lady, an exploration of patriarchy’s hold on women’s lives, through the story of Forough Kia, a middle-aged single mother and filmmaker who must brave her teenage son’s anger and hostility in order to date and experience love again. Under the City’s Skin traces the dangerous effects of class division, poverty, and political violence on the working-class urban poor in Tehran through the story of Toba, who tries to hold together her family inside a violent and unjust social system. In Gilaneh, Bani-Etemad puts a different spin on the Sacred Defense Cinema genre, wherein the titular character survives the Iran–Iraq War badly damaged, only to witness emotionlessly the Anglo-American invasion of Baghdad. By her stark portraits of the suffering of the urban poor, Bani-Etemad challenges social nostalgia for the Iran–Iraq War while exposing the waste of human life in this later invasion.

Tales (2014), featuring star Mohammed Reza Forutan, is a portmanteau film, comprising seven stories of contemporary personal relationships in Iran, which once again returns us to the developing lives of the main characters from the City Trilogy. Otherwise, Bani-Etemad’s focus in the 2010s has once again been on documentaries. She has completed Kahrizak, Four Views (2012); All My Trees (2014), about environmental activist Malagha Mallah; Aay Adam Ha (2016); and Touran Khanom (2019), a collaborative work made with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb about children’s education activist Touran Mirhadi. Along with many other Iranian film directors, Bani-Etemad signed the October 2019 joint statement objecting to increasing obstacles to film production and exhibition in the country. See also GENDER AND SEXUALITY.

BARAKAT, HENRI (1912–1997)

An Egyptian filmmaker who studied cinema in France, Barakat returned to Egypt following the outbreak of World War II to direct an adaptation of Anton Chekov’s play The Vagabond (1942). Most active during the 1950s and 1960s, he is recognized as the master of Egyptian romance and melodrama. Barakat films usually depict a suffering female who experiences emotional turmoil before meeting with a climactic and tragic fate. Barakat filmed Faten Hamama in some of her most memorable roles, most notably as Amna in The Nightingale’s Prayer (aka Call of the Curlew) (1959) and as the raped peasant woman, forced to conceal her pregnancy and accidentally suffocating her newborn, in The Sin (1965). In both these films, Barakat portrays the social injustices and hardships of rural Egypt. In A Man in Our House (1961), Barakat sets his thwarted romance against the backdrop of Egypt’s struggle for independence, as a young terrorist/political assassin (Omar Sharif) takes refuge in a family house, falls in love with the youngest daughter (Zahret El-Ola), and tests the family’s loyalties to their nation.

In The Open Door (1963), Barakat broaches another overtly political subject, women’s roles and the Suez crisis, as Layla (Hamama), a university graduate and activist, returns home to confront romantic disappointment and cynicism (associated with the tyranny of the old regime) while struggling for national pride and political accomplishment. Barakat gave two other important Egyptian stars their first roles: Souad Hosni (in Hassan and Naima [1959]) and Lebanese singer Sabah (in One for the Heart [1945]). His films are also known for their extravagant musical scores and dramatic interludes, including Love of My Life (1947) and the musical comedy The Genie Lady (1950), both starring Lebanese singer Farid al-Atrache and costarring Samia Gamal; and The Immortal Song (1952), again starring al-Atrache alongside Hamama. In Barakat’s final feature, The Night of Fatma’s Arrest (1984), the story is told in flashback, with Fatma (Hamama) as a woman committed to a mental hospital by her brother in an attempt to prevent her from exposing his corruption.

BARAN (2001)

Majid Majidi’s film is a melodrama of self-sacrifice and the suffering of Afghan refugees in Iran. Lateef works as cook and grocery buyer for the workers at a construction site, until he is displaced from his position of relative comfort by the arrival of Rahmat, who comes to replace his father as a money earner after the latter’s injury in an accident at the site. At first fiercely resentful, Lateef’s feelings quickly change to love when he realizes that Rahmat is in fact a girl, Baran. First saving her from arrest, he later sacrifices his own savings and identity documents—thus metaphorically becoming an “Afghan” himself—for her impoverished family’s well-being. The film ends with their setting out to return to Afghanistan: Lateef left only with the fading memory of a fleeting glimpse of Baran’s face and the imprint of her foot in the mud quickly filling with rain (“baran” in Persian). Baran’s focus on displacement, transnational labor, and a multiethnic Iran is emphasized by Lateef’s own Turkish roots.

Stylistically, the film is marked by a preponderance of moving-camera and high-angle shots looking down on the construction site and environs. Despite the scenes of hard work, the focus on communal activities ensures that, like the refugee camp in which Baran lives, the workplace is somewhat romanticized, while slow motion and mood music help emphasize Lateef’s heroism. Released soon after the events of 11 September 2001, Baran was poorly promoted in the United States and did not meet with the success of Majidi’s two earlier films, Children of Heaven (1997) and Color of Paradise (1999).

BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER (1986)

Bahram Beyzai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger is a key Iranian film of the early postrevolutionary period. It begins, dramatically, with the fiery deaths of the protagonist’s family in the war-torn desert landscape of Khuzestan, in southern Iran near the Iraqi border. The boy, Bashu, flees the area by stowing away in a truck to the lush Caspian Sea region in the Iranian north. The extreme long shots and telephoto lenses used to convey this journey are strikingly contrasted by the entry of Nai’i (Susan Taslimi), who, in a startling and much-discussed close-up, rises into the frame from the rice fields, her eyes apparently fixed on the spectator. Nai’i, whose husband is away either at war or doing industrial work in a distant town, adopts Bashu—whose dark skin and Arabic language mark his difference—and protects him from suspicious villagers. The two communicate by action and gesture and eventually a formal Persian that provides a lingua franca not native to either of them. Nonlinguistic communication remains privileged, however, and Beyzai incorporates elements from Eastern theatrical tradition to tell a broadly humanist antiwar story in which Bashu’s dead mother haunts his new world and facilitates Nai’i’s adoption of him. Although these war references have generally been blamed for Bashu’s having remained unscreened in Iran for three years and finally shown only in 1989, after the end of the war with Iraq, its strong, somewhat confrontational portrayal of Nai’i and its implicit renegotiation of Iranian identity may have equally troubled the censors.

BAT-ADAM, MICHAL (1945–)

One of the Israeli film industry’s only female directors, Michal Bat-Adam is also a trained actor who has performed in films of the Young Israeli Cinema, including The House on Chelouche Street (1973) and Daughters, Daughters (1973), both directed by her husband, Moshe Mizrahi; Atalia (Akiva Tevet, 1984); and Moments de la vie d’une femme (1979), The Lover (1985), and The Deserter’s Wife (1992), which she also directed. Bat-Adam’s star intertext promotes diplomatic confrontation of the social and cultural contradictions marring Ashkenazi–Mizrahi relations in Israel, implying through the self-consciously ambiguous performance of stereotypical feminine behavior that such contradictions can be overcome aesthetically. Her 2016 feature, The Road to Where, carries this discourse into the question of Israeli‒Palestinian relations. See also WOMEN.

BATTLE OF ALGIERS, THE (1966)

Directed by Italian socialist and activist Gillo Pontecorvo (1919–2006) and coproduced by the only independent production company in postindependence Algeria, Casbah Films, headed by Yacef Saadi, the onetime Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) military commander in Algiers, who plays himself in the film, The Battle of Algiers is one of history’s most powerful cinematic studies of colonial occupation and its resistance. Pontecorvo’s documentary-style reenactment of a key series of episodes in Algeria’s struggle for independence from France re-creates the Algerian uprising against the occupying French during the Battle of Algiers of 1954–1957. The film opens in 1957, as Colonel Mathieu, a cold-blooded representative of the French military, has just forced a confession revealing the location of Ali La Pointe, an FLN member and a symbol of Algerian resistance and identity. Paratroopers locate La Pointe and other resistance fighters, including a young woman and 13-year-old boy, hiding inside the Casbah. Their ultimatum: surrender or be blown up. As La Pointe and his comrades consider their options, the film flashes back to 1954, when the FLN launched major military operations in Algiers, and re-creates key stages in the uprising and in La Pointe’s political development. Meanwhile, Mathieu places the Casbah under martial law, with military checkpoints, raids, and mass arrests. The FLN reacts with assassinations, and Mathieu unleashes a program of systematic torture and other forms of collective punishment.

By 1957, the rebellion weakens in the face of intensifying French military efforts and the capture of FLN leaders. However, the film ends with the outbreak of mass demonstrations and a renewed Algerian uprising that eventually forced France to cede power to the FLN. Pontecorvo’s development of a quasi-documentary form of realism, with newsreel-style narration and captions, 16-mm handheld news cameras, and the use of FLN and official French military proclamations, were groundbreaking. An accomplished composer and musician, Pontecorvo provided his film with a complex soundtrack, highlighted by Ennio Morricone’s alternately overwhelming and restrained score. While The Battle of Algiers was immediately successful in Algeria, Italy, and the United States, it was banned in France and Great Britain until 1971. It was also one of a few anticolonial films to be banned under the shah in Iran, but it was exhibited after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It has remained pertinent in more recent times and was supposedly screened for American military leaders at the Pentagon in the early stages of the Iraq War.

BAYOUMI, MOHAMED (1894–1963)

Born in Tata, Egypt, Bayoumi graduated from military school in Cairo in 1915 and served in Sudan and Palestine. Eager to be involved with the cinema, he moved briefly to Berlin in the early 1920s, where he studied film and worked as a minor actor in the German film industry, then in one of its most creative periods. Returning to Egypt, Bayoumi was cinematographer on Italian Victor Rosito’s In the Land of Tutankhamen (1923), and he directed a short film version of a play, The Clerk (1923). He founded Amon Films in Cairo, where he oversaw the production of a series of newsreels and patriotic, anti-British shorts, as well as some short narratives, such as Barsum Looking for a Job (1923). In 1924, Bayoumi filmed the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. He apparently completed a narrative feature, The Victim, as cinematographer and director in 1928, but it was not released, meaning that his only directorial feature was Fiancé Number 13 (1933), shortly after which he abandoned film production. Bayoumi founded a cinematographic training institute, Egypt’s first, in Alexandria in 1932.

BEHI, RIDHA (1947–)

Born in the Muslim holy city of Kairouan in Tunisia, Behi studied sociology and ethnography at Nanterre, then began his filmmaking career with Hyenas’ Sun (1977), a scathing indictment of Western transnationalism in which the economic and political structure of an entire seaside Berber village is irrevocably transformed when a European tourist resort is built nearby. Behi’s subsequent The Angels (1984), however, was a melodrama in the Egyptian style, as was his Bitter Champagne (1988), starring Julie Christie and Ben Gazzara, concerning a young man who unwittingly has an affair with his father’s mistress. Despite their generic styles and Western stars, these films were subject to censorship for their perceived political undertones.

Behi again selected an international cast for Swallows Never Die in Jerusalem (1994), a melodramatic homage to the Palestinian struggle set on the eve of the Oslo Accords. Richard, a French television journalist, travels to Israel to cover the historic negotiations. There he meets a Palestinian taxi driver, Hammoudi/“Local Radio” (Curfew’s Salim Dau), who he learns has been searching for his long-lost grandmother, and he decides to arrange a television interview between his own Jewish girlfriend Esther’s father, Moshe (Ben Gazzara), a Holocaust survivor, and Hammoudi’s father, a Gazan refugee. Hammoudi’s brother, Riadh, however, formerly an exile in Jordan, has joined an Islamist organization that violently protests the Oslo Accords, thus undermining Richard’s mediating efforts. His idealism is strikingly figured in a noteworthy panning shot of Jerusalem that enframes the major holy sites of all three religions represented by the film’s characters, which prefigures a similar shot in a later Palestinian film, Looking Awry / Hawal (Sobhi al-Zobaidi, 2005). Swallows has been criticized for its displacement of excessive blame on Palestinian militants, especially those adherent to Islam, for the failures of Oslo.

Behi’s provocative, humanist critiques of conflict and political idealism continued with The Magic Box (2002), which examines the complex life of Raouf, a resident of Tunis whose French wife, burdened with ennui, has become an alcoholic. To escape ensuing domestic problems, he decides to write a screenplay about his childhood in Kairouan. The screenplay recounts his early relationship with his uncle, a traveling film projectionist who owns a cinema caravan and whom Raouf accompanies throughout the rural countryside as respite from the harsh treatment he receives from his strict, religious father. Recalling Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1990), with which the film has been compared, Raouf’s uncle introduces him to the wonders of cinema, a gift that comes full circle in the present context of the screenplay. Always Brando (2011), a project originally intended to feature the iconic American actor, both celebrates his skills and recounts the often corrupt nature of the movie business. The Flower of Aleppo (2016), starring Hend Sabri, tells the story of a woman who goes to Syria to retrieve her son who has joined ISIS.

BEIRUT THE ENCOUNTER (1981)

Shot on location during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s film depicts a chance meeting between two young friends separated by the war. Their encounter is emblematic of the displacement and uncertainty faced when navigating intersectarian relationships and the obstacles of everyday political violence. Zeina and Haidar agree to meet at the airport to exchange audio letters before Zeina leaves Lebanon for America, where she plans to pursue her studies. Rather than overt violence, the backdrop of war shows a society paralyzed by the material signs of disjuncture (sporadic electricity, water, and phone connections, as well as roadblocks and traffic jams); time is hostage—no one knows how long it will take to cross the city or for the war to end. At film’s end, Zeina is stuck in traffic on the way to the airport, and Haidar gives up and leaves. A powerful symbol of departure and disconnection, the airport serves as a site of impossible good-byes. See also UNDER THE BOMBS (2007).

BELKADHI, NÉJIB (1972–)

Belkadhi is a Tunisian actor, filmmaker, and producer whose reputation has been built on a satirical television program, Chams Alik, which he produced and hosted on Canal Horizons in 2000. The characters in Belkadhi’s films have dreams that take them beyond the tough reality of their lives. VHS-Kahloucha (2006) is an upbeat documentary about the shooting of a film by a former mason turned filmmaker and actor, Kahloucha. This extraordinary character had featured as the protagonist in numerous low-budget genre films that he made and financed himself. These films have circulated widely on VHS in both Tunisia and the diaspora. Adopting a caustic and at times hilarious approach, Belkadhi presents Kahloucha while maintaining a keen awareness of the desperation of communities left behind in the modern race for economic prosperity.

It took years for Belkhadi to make his first narrative feature. Based on a screenplay he wrote in 2007, Bastardo (2013) is an allegory about corruption and the submission of the majority to the will of the most powerful. In an enclosed district where the struggle for power justifies any kind of violence, the film’s protagonist, Mohsen, has come to be called “bastard” because he was found in a trash can as a baby. His lowly status changes overnight when he sets up a mobile phone antenna, which leads to conflict with local mobsters. Look at Me (2018), a later narrative feature that garnered large box-office returns in Tunisia, focuses on a deadbeat dad, Lotfi (Nidhal Saadi), who moves to Marseilles after having abandoned his wife and autistic son, Amr. Compelled to return to Tunisia when his wife has a stroke, Lotfi tries to bond with Amr, who is not receptive. Lotfi is in turn confronted with the lies that he told his family in Tunisia and his girlfriend in France in order to build his new life in diaspora. This sensitive evocation of the nature of family relationships under postcolonial conditions contributes along with Dear Son (Mohamed Ben Attia, 2018) and Fatwa (Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, 2018) to a series of contemporary portrayals in Tunisian cinema of more nuanced father figures, which foreground struggles with paternity.

BELLABÈS, HAKIM (1961–)

Born into the large family of a cinema owner in the small town of Bejjaad in Morocco, Bellabès studied African literature in Morocco and France before earning a master’s degree in film from Columbia College in Chicago. Belabbès is a prolific filmmaker who controls all the aspects of the production process; he has scripted and edited almost every film he has directed and has also at times been the director of photography and producer. Treading the thin line between documentary and fiction, Belabbès’s films are poetic evocations of separation, migration, and homecoming, often explored through autobiographical accounts, as in Boujad: A Nest in the Heat (1992), in which he presents a world of changing values, shedding light on the vulnerability and resilience of ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by inequity or their own inability to sustain relationships. His narrative feature Threads (2003) follows a Moroccan exile, Mehdi, who wants to return home to die in Bejjaad, where he was born. Mehdi is accompanied by his daughter, Hayat, with whom he meets a range of people also struggling to get by. In Pieces (2010) is a documentary that weaves together home movies of Belabbès’s extended family reunions in Morocco over the years. The film bears witness to the rarity of Belabbès’s presence at these events and constitutes a reflection on his relationship with his father. Weight of the Shadow (2015) picks up one of the threads left hanging in In Pieces, a story the filmmaker claims he should have told long ago, that of the quest for truth undertaken by a family whose son was kidnapped decades earlier for having organized a protest in a boarding school. Sweat Rain (2017) is a simple yet intimate tale about a rural family seeking to maintain its unity and bearings through the father Mbarek’s (Amine Ennaji) desperate attempt to save his land for his son, Ayoub, who has Down syndrome, when he can no longer afford the repayment of a loan. Piecing together close-ups of mineral and organic elements, Bellabès conveys the deep emotions and commitment of nearly silent characters whose material and spiritual lives revolve around tilling the soil. The land is, however, unresponsive to the efforts of the protagonists, who continue to struggle against their socioeconomic conditions, which relentlessly pull them down.

BELLY DANCING

Known in Arabic as raqs sharqi and in Turkish as çiftetelli or Oryantal tansi (“dance of the East”), belly dancing is a dance form indigenous to the Middle East. It was originally a communal folk dance (raqs biladi) held at social occasions not involving performance before an audience. These included meetings between women, often under gender-segregated conditions, and, reputedly, birth rituals, as a means of strengthening abdominal muscles.

With the onset of European colonialism and the growth of an entertainment industry, belly dancing was co-opted by the West in orientalist fashion, as an exotic, sexually alluring performance by women (and sometimes men) for men. Its appropriation into cinema was facilitated by Sol Bloom, an American promoter of Egyptian culture (where belly dancing is rooted most strongly) at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Bloom coined the English term “belly dancing,” and by the 1920s, the form had achieved scandalous renown across the United States as “hoochy-koochy.” A vaudevillian precursor to burlesque, belly dancing was also incorporated into the avant-garde cinematic dance experiments of Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, belly dancing had become a tourist attraction at Cairene and Lebanese nightclubs, promoted largely by the mode’s modern progenitor, Lebanese Syrian Badia Musabni, who would help launch the careers of dancers Tahiyya Carioca, Samia Gamal, Naima Akef, and others who became Egyptian movie stars in musicals featuring a variety of belly dancing numbers, although Farida Fahmy would offer a less sexualized, more folkloric image of the art during the Gamal Abdel Nasser years, perhaps echoing the star persona of singer Umm Kulthum. Two of the most renowned contemporary belly dancers in the region are Fifi Abdo and Dina, both Egyptian.

Since the events of 11 September 2001, belly dancing has undergone a popular revival among American women seeking intercultural understanding in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During this period, the revisionist belly dancing film Satin Rouge (Raja Amari, 2002) represented Tunisian women reappropriating the form for the sake of female solidarity and bonding, thus standing potentially to challenge the neo-orientalism of Western interests. A similar revision is offered in Viva Algeria (Nadir Moknèche, 2004). In The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007), belly dancing becomes a mode of resistance to the economic marginalization and disenfranchisement of the beur community in postcolonial France.

Belly dancing has also been used as what Edward Said would call a self-orientalizing practice, within countless Middle Eastern cinemas, especially those of Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and Israel. That practice is critiqued in Waiting (Rashid Masharawi, 2005), which foregrounds the function of belly dancing as a tourist attraction for exilic Palestinians, and Whatever Lola Wants (Nabil Ayouch, 2006), which supplies a transnational angle on tourism.

BELOUFA, FAROUK (1947–2018)

Beloufa, who was a French-resident Algerian filmmaker, attended the Institut National du Cinéma d’Alger in 1964 and studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in 1966, before directing a documentary, The War of Liberation (1973). He was an assistant to Youssef Chahine on the Algerian–Egyptian coproduction The Return of the Prodigal Son (1976), then directed his first and only feature, Nahla (1979), set during the 1975 war in Lebanon. Nahla chronicles the relationships of a young Algerian journalist, who works at a pro-Palestinian newspaper, with three women—a faltering singer (the titular Nahla), a journalist, and an activist—who share their stories with him across a series of elliptical scenes. The film’s narrative-compositional structure and a musical score by Fairuz’s son, Ziad Rahbani, reflect the confusions and renewed perspectives brought about during the Lebanese Civil War. Hailed by critics, the film was subject to a failed censorship attempt by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina and played widely, if not always to popular acclaim, throughout Algeria.

BEN AMAR (BEN AMMAR), ABDELLATIF (1943–)

Born in Tunis, Ben Amar graduated in 1964 from the Institut des hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris. He directed three significant features during the 1970s: Such a Simple Story (1970), Sejnane (1974), and Aziza (1979/80), all of which were granted awards at the Carthage Film Festival. Such a Simple Story examines the contradictions of social integration in Tunisia through a film-within-a-film plot structure. Chamseddine, a young filmmaker, is documenting Tunisian migrant workers returning from Europe, in particular Hamed, who recounts the difficulty he faces reinserting himself into rural life with a foreign wife whose Western views are not accepted. Chamseddine’s fiancée from France also has difficulties adapting and is not accepted by his family. Sejnane is a key anticolonial film offering a portrait of the events surrounding Tunisian independence. Set in 1952 Tunis, it tells the story of Kemal, who works in a printing company and whose father is assassinated by a secret colonial organization. Kemal’s love interest, the daughter of the company’s owner, is to be married by arrangement to another man, leading Kemal to begin asking questions about Tunisia’s political situation and to become involved with union activists. He is killed when they are all shot down—as his love is being married off. Aziza shifts the focus of change and integration to the story of a young woman who must adapt when her rural family moves into modern housing in a working-class urban suburb. Among other things, the move disrupts traditional gender roles; as the men in her family deal with diminished patriarchal authority, Aziza finds work in a local textile factory and achieves financial independence.

For the next 20 years, Ben Amar specialized in documentaries and commercials, and, through his production company, Latif Productions, produced Wanderers in the Desert (aka The Drifters) (Nacer Khemir, 1984). Then, in 2002, he directed The Song of the Noria (aka Melody of the Waterwheel), perhaps the first Tunisian example of the road movie genre. Zeineb, in her thirties, is finally granted a legal divorce but flees in fear of her jealous husband on the advice of her attorney. She meets an old flame, Mohamed, an archaeologist whose father, it is gradually revealed, has committed suicide following the expropriation of his land. Mohamed is trying to locate a film crew, one of whose members owes him money, and to save enough to study in France. He and Zeinab travel together across the desert in search of the film crew that might provide their desired escape, but never locate it, instead becoming entangled with a con man and a group of thugs sent by Zeinab’s husband. His later Wounded Palm Trees (2010) is an Algerian‒Tunisian production about a young woman’s quest to understand the violence in Bizerte in 1961 that led to her father’s death. This little-known conflict occurred on the margins of the Algerian war of liberation and pitted the French army, which had retained control over two military bases in this remote area of Tunisia, against Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba’s desire to remove them; the ensuing violence caused the deaths of hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000, Tunisians.

BEN ATTIA, MOHAMED (1976–)

Ben Attia is a Tunisian filmmaker and screenwriter who earned a business degree in Tunis and then a degree in communication in France before making a range of short films, among them Kif Lochrin (2006), which was awarded the Silver Stallion at FESPACO in 2006, and Selma (2013), which won numerous awards.

Ben Attia’s films are generic works that explore moments of rupture in the personal lives of his characters as they struggle for meaning within stifling environments. His first feature-length film, Hedi (2016), focuses on a soon-to-be-married traveling salesman whose passion is drawing comic strips. Hedi feels trapped by his overbearing mother until he meets Rym, an entertainer in a large hotel. The ensuing passionate love affair compels him to come to terms with his incapacity to make his own decisions. Dear Son (2018) examines Islamic radicalization from an atypical perspective. A working-class couple, Riadh and Nazli, living in a suburb of Tunis worries about their son Sami’s migraines as he prepares to graduate from secondary school. Sami’s sudden disappearance marks the beginning of a long journey for his parents, at the end of which they must come to terms with his decision to join ISIS in Syria. The impact of Dear Son derives from its focus on parental distress rather than child psychology. The spectator, like Riadh and Nazli, must grapple, self-reflexively, with the possible motivations behind Sami’s choice. Both Dear Son and Hedi were coproduced with the ostensibly left-leaning Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne brothers.

BEN BARKA, SOUHEIL (1942–)

Ben Barka is known for his mix of realism in historical epics, as well as for championing African issues of social justice in films that at once exemplify and stand to critique salient aspects of African transnational cinema. His work ranges from films critiquing modern social malaise to blockbuster historical epics interrogating the power struggles in Pharaonic Egypt and Andalusian Spain– Morocco–Turkey, and against colonialism in Morocco. Born in Timbuktu, Mali, Ben Barka earned a degree in sociology from Rome University after graduating in filmmaking from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He worked for five years in Italy as assistant to, among others, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Upon coming to Morocco, he established Euro-Maghreb Films and later built a series of cinema complexes, Le Dawliz, in several Moroccan cities.

As a filmmaker and producer, he made a number of documentary shorts and features before becoming director of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain from 1986 to 2003. Ben Barka’s first feature, 1001 Hands (1972), made partly with European funding, attacked the impact of tourism on the Moroccan underclass and the discrepancy between Morocco’s powerful merchants and workers exploited for their labor. Another feature, The Oil War Will Not Happen (1974), concerning exploited oil workers in an anonymous African country, was banned in Morocco just after it received its exhibition permit, even though the government had facilitated certain sequences, allowing filming at a state-run petroleum complex and giving permission for the army to appear in a struggle against oil workers. According to Ben Barka, the film was banned because it criticized Saudi Arabia. Amok (1982)—an antiapartheid drama funded by Senegal, Guinea, and Morocco and adapted from Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)—was the first film concerning South African apartheid shot entirely in sub-Saharan Africa. Ben Barka has continued to make films, sometimes for television, sporadically. In 2019, after a 17-year gap, he released De sable et de feu (Of Sand and Fire), a historical drama.

BEN HANIA, KAOUTHER (1977–)

Born in Sidi Bouzid, Ben Hania is a prolific Tunisian screenwriter and filmmaker who works in both fictional and documentary modes. A former member of the Fédération Tunisienne des Cinéastes Amateurs, a politically engaged federation of amateur filmmakers in Tunisia, she trained at Femis in France. Her short films include Me, My Sister and “the Thing” (2006) and Wooden Hand (2013), the latter about a little girl, Amira, who does not wish to attend Kouttab (Qur’anic preschool). Ben Hania develops narratives based on news items and uses them to explore the porosity between social reality and fiction as well as to expose relationships of power created, at least in part, by the act of filming. Her first feature-length film, The Blade of Tunis (2013), recounts the mysterious story of a man accused of slashing women’s buttocks while riding on his moped. Shot in documentary style, this fictional work follows a filmmaker (played by Ben Hania) as she attempts, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, to uncover the truth about this man but ends up leading the viewer instead through a mélange of improbable interviews that enable an exploration of the construction of the slashings into a national news event. Zeineb Hates the Snow (2016) is a documentary shot over several years that captures the intimate lives of a widowed mother and her daughter as they move from Tunisia to Canada to start a new life. The film won the Tanit d’or at the Carthage Film Festival in 2016. Beauty and the Dogs (2017) is based on the true story of a woman who is raped by two policemen and in turn transforms from a shamefaced victim into a fighter for justice and women’s rights under repressive social conditions. The film, which has attracted large audiences both in Tunisia and abroad, comprises a series of extremely long sequence shots that frame the progressive shift in power between the police and the protagonist, Mariam, through the course of their film-length confrontation. See also ISLAM (ISLAMIST).

BEN HIRSI, BADER (1968–)

Born in London, as the youngest of 14 children to Yemeni exile parents, Bader Ben Hirsi is the director of Yemen’s first feature, A New Day in Old Sana’a (2005). Trained in business and theater, Ben Hirsi began to make films in collaboration with his childhood friend, also of Yemeni descent, Ahmed Al Abdali, who has composed music for and produced their projects. After visiting Yemen for the first time in 1995 at the age of 27, Ben Hirsi directed a documentary, The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman (2000), chronicling his return visit to his ancestral homeland under the guidance of English expatriate travel writer Tim Macintosh-Smith. Ben Hirsi and Al Abdali have also created other documentaries on Yemen’s contested Socatra Island, the Saudi response to 9/11, the Hadj pilgrimage, and Yemen and the “war on terror.” Shifting into narrative filmmaking, they made several short dramas before embarking on A New Day in Old Sana’a.

BEN MAHMOUD, MAHMOUD (1947–)

Born in Tunis, beur filmmaker Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud studied cinema at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion, then history of art, archaeology, and journalism in Belgium, where he has taught since 1988 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In addition to directing numerous documentaries, Ben Mahmoud’s first feature was the autobiographical Crossing Over (aka Crossings) (1981), the story of two travelers crossing the English Channel in a ferry, one an Arab intellectual (Youssef), the other a working-class Eastern European (Bogdan). When they try to disembark at Dover, Bogdan is refused entry because he has no money, and Youssef is refused because his visa has expired. Their treatment by British customs officers is violent and dismissive; Bogdan is subject to a strip search. The ferry returns with them to Belgium, where they receive similar treatment from customs officers there; this time, however, Bogdan is beaten not only by police but by a local white supremacist gang when he and Youssef try to escape. Forced to remain on board the ferry in seeming perpetuity, Bogdan takes a job washing dishes, but, dejected by Youssef’s accusation that he has evaded his political responsibilities by refusing to fight back against his ill treatment, he murders a guard. Youssef, on the other hand, decides to write about their experience, which metaphorizes exile and alienation in a transnational world. With Fadhel Jaïbi, Ben Mahmoud subsequently codirected Diamond Dust (1992), which through emphasis on memory and genealogy explores the incapacity of minorities to communicate within the dominant culture. A further solo feature, The Pomegranate Siesta, was released in 1999.

The Professor (2013) considers the reconfiguration of the political landscape in the 1970s after Habib Bourguiba imposed his lifetime presidency in Tunisia. The protagonist is a member of the League of Human Rights created in 1976. He participates in political meetings while having an affair with a student, both of which will lead to his downfall and deportation to a remote rural area. Ben Mahmoud’s next film was the award-winning Fatwa (2019), in which a father (Ahmed Hafiane) returns to Tunisia from France, where he lives, in order to bury his son, who is said to have died in a motorcycle accident. During this trip, the father meets his estranged wife (Ghalia Benali), who is under a fatwa (legal injunction) for having written a book denouncing Salafism. As the two argue about the rituals they want for the burial, the father discovers that his son had joined a militant Islamist group. Fatwa depicts the unraveling of intimate family relationships while relying on the suspense of the thriller genre, suggesting that Ben Mahmoud is reaching out to a larger, more diverse public.

BENANI (BENNANI), HAMID (1940[1942?]–)

A film school graduate from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris, Moroccan-born Benani made short films for Moroccan television and wrote for the review Cinema 3, Morocco’s only cinema studies publication. Benani’s debut film, Traces (1970), treats the social and psychological problems of a young boy, adopted by an authoritarian father, who yearns for liberty and autonomy. The film was hailed by critics and historians as an “auteur” vehicle rich in signs and visual symbols, yet its semiological density made it unpopular with mainstream filmgoers. Twenty-five years later, Benani’s second feature, an adaptation of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel A Prayer for the Absent (1995), is an equally semiotically rich exploration of a young man’s search for self-identity and religious reconciliation, while L’enfant cheikh (2011) is an ode to Amazigh resistance in the Rif War.

BENGUIGUI, YAMINA (1957–)

Born in France to Algerian parents, Benguigui is the director of penetrating films on women’s issues related to the North African immigrant, or beur, community in France, including the documentaries Women of Islam (1994), Immigrant Memories: The North African Inheritance (1997) (based on her book of the same name), and The Perfumed Garden (2000), as well as many other documentaries and shorts, some made for television. Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001), her first fictional feature (based on her novel of the same name), tells the story of Zouina, who arrives in France from rural Algeria following the 1974 family reunion law that allows Algerian women to join husbands working in France. Zouina’s husband, Ahmed, is overprotective of Zouina and grants her only limited liberties. She struggles with his physical abuse and her mother-in-law’s verbal harassment and is helped by French friends to extricate herself from the situation through acclimation to French life and culture. As a result, Zouina becomes more confident, by film’s end achieving a modicum of self-determination beyond the domestic sphere. Benguigui has continued to make documentaries, including a controversial account of the deprived Seine Saint-Denis department in northeastern Paris, 9/3 Memory of a Territory (2008). Elected to the Paris City Council in 2008 and briefly serving as a junior minister for French nationals abroad in 2012, Benguigui has become increasingly involved in politics and worked for Martine Aubry’s campaign in the 2012 French elections.

BENHADJ, MOHAMED RACHID (1949–)

Algerian Benhadj grew up in Algiers, studied cinema at Université de Paris, made documentaries for Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne, then directed his first feature, Desert Rose, in 1989. The film recounts, through his own eyes, the life of a young, severely handicapped boy, Moussa, who struggles to overcome his infirmities in a remote desert village. The film’s rich detail is expressed in images and sound rather than words. After directing Touchia (1993), concerning social struggle in Algeria, Benhadj continued his examination of childhood struggle in Mirka (1999), which follows an abandoned infant in the Balkans as he searches for his roots and lost mother. It stands as an indictment of rape as a tool of war. By this time, Benhadj had moved to Italy; however, in 2005, he adapted For Bread Alone from the book by Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri, about the political coming to consciousness of young Mohamed, a street urchin from a severely impoverished Tangiers family. Leaving home to avoid starvation and paternal abuse, Mohamed becomes involved in drugs, alcohol, thievery, and prostitution and is eventually arrested and imprisoned at 20. In prison, he meets a nationalist leader, learns to read and write, and, upon his release, becomes a primary school teacher working to educate children on how to escape from poverty and ignorance. Benhadj, who studied architecture, is also an accomplished painter.

This concern for the marginalized, impoverished, and related social problems continues with Perfumes of Algiers (2012), a film about Karima, a female photographer at the height of her career in Europe who must go back to Algiers to visit her dying father, whom she ran from 20 years earlier. Once in Algiers, she attempts to get her brother, who has been sentenced for terrorism offenses, released from prison. The Star of Algiers (2016), adapted from Aziz Chouaki’s novel of the same name, raises the question of personal fulfillment. It is about a young singer and musician whose career takes off at the same time as his dream is threatened by Islamists. Matarès (2019) concerns two children who sell flowers in the market and the Roman ruins of the titular Algerian city. One, Mona, a migrant from the Ivory Coast, seeks to collect the money she needs to reach Italy in order to be reunited with her father but must overcome the antipathy of the other, local boy Said, who resents her intrusion on his territory.

BENJELLOUN, HASSAN (1950–)

Previously a pharmacist, Benjelloun trained in Paris at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français and has gone on to become one of Morocco’s most prolific directors. His Judgment of a Woman (2000) raises the questions of women’s rights and divorce, while his comedy The Pal (2002), enormously popular at the box office, depicts poor Moroccans struggling against the rich for their legal rights. The Black Room (2004), inspired by the book by Jaouad Mdidech, depicts the Years of Lead in Morocco under King Hassan II, when Marxists, students, and union leaders were imprisoned and tortured. Where Are You Going, Moshe? (2007) treats the historical period during which Jews were recruited to leave Morocco for Israel, told through the device of a bar owner who tries to keep at least one Jew in the village so that his bar won’t be closed, while The Forgotten People of History (2009) deals with taboos, in particular slavery and sexual exploitation, through the story of Yamna, who is thrown out of her home for not being a virgin and recruited by an organization that forces her to become a prostitute in Europe.

BENLYAZID (BELYAZID), FARIDA (1948–)

Farida Benlyazid is a Moroccan journalist, documentarian, screenwriter, and filmmaker known for her representations of women’s lives in scripts and personal films that often depict their oppression and attempts at liberation from patriarchy. Benlyazid studied cinema at the École Supérieure des Études Cinématographiques in Paris, from which she graduated in 1976. She returned to Morocco in the early 1980s, where she made a television film, Identité de femmes (1979), and scripted two films (A Hole in the Wall [1978] and Reed Dolls [1981]) for her husband, filmmaker Jilali Ferhati, before turning to her own feature filmmaking with A Door to the Sky (1988). She scripted two features for Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi: Badis (1988) and Looking for the Husband of My Wife (1993). Her next three directorial features were adaptations: Women’s Wiles (1999), based on a historical fairy tale; Casablanca Casablanca (2002); and The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni (2005), based on the novel by Angel Vazques. After an eight-year gap, in 2013 she directed Frontieras, about the political division of the Sahara.

BENSAÏDI, FAOUZI (1967–)

Born in Meknès, Morocco, Bensaïdi is an actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker who has contributed to the development of screenwriting and pioneered new directions in film aesthetics in Morocco. Trained in Rabat and Paris, he worked as a theater director before turning to film directing. His short The Cliff (1998) received many awards, as did the subsequent Le Mur (2000) and Trajets (2000). Attending rigorously to framing and shot composition, Bensaïdi weaves film form and narrative together in a relentless exploration of the impossibility of communication and the violence inherent in closed, conservative, class-bound communities.

His feature-length A Thousand Months (2002) portrays a small child, Mehdi, who encounters the strangeness of life in a small mountain village to which he has moved with his mother, Amina, to live with his paternal grandfather after his dissident father, unbeknownst to Mehdi, is arrested on political charges. WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006) is a postmodern action film in which style is more significant than a plot that focuses on several characters, the most important of whom are a contract killer, a policewoman, and a young hacker who is attempting to migrate to Europe. Bensaïdi plays the part of the killer, whom we never see speak, with an understated, deadpan humor that references the work of Elia Suleiman. Death for Sale (2011) focuses on the friendship between three young men who live in Tetouan and, having no future prospects, decide to rob a jewelry store. Their friendship is put to the test when one of them falls in love with a beautiful but enigmatic woman who appears out of nowhere, with dire consequences for the robbery. Bensaïdi organizes the narrative into a series of three-shots of the outlaw friends, as if to portend the ultimately climactic unraveling of a doomed unity. Volubilis (2017), named after the ruined Amazigh city near the film’s setting of Meknes, explores the closed and merciless class system in Morocco, as a dull-headed shopping mall security guard, Abdelkader, and his wife, Malika, a maid in an upper-class home, are propelled into a dramatic spiral of violence as they attempt to enforce justice against Malika’s employer (Bensaïdi). Bensaïdi features in his all of these films and frequently appears in those made by others.

BENT FAMILIA (TUNISIENNES) (1997)

The personal lives of three women are exposed and analyzed in this contemporary Tunisian melodrama directed by Nouri Bouzid. Aida is a divorced college professor, proud of her Arab heritage but equally unashamed of her sexuality, who is in love with a Palestinian sequestered in Gaza and is criticized as promiscuous by her adolescent son. Her urban apartment has become a shelter for Fatiha, a refugee from violence in Algeria, and Amina, Aida’s former school friend now married to a wealthy banker who confines her to the home and rapes her out of jealousy. Through careful alternation between interior and exterior scenes, and from the women’s corresponding physical stasis to relative mobility, Bouzid traces each woman’s enlightenment and healing to shifting social and economic conditions in Tunisia. By film’s end, under Aida’s outspoken tutelage, Fatiha decides to return to Algeria despite and because of the challenges it presents, and Amina to divorce her husband, notwithstanding disapproval from her family and social circle.

BERBER FILMS

See AMAZIGH FILMS (BERBER FILMS).

BERLIN IN BERLIN (1993)

Set in the Turkish sector of Berlin, this transnational drama directed by Sinan Çetin depicts the transfer of gender struggles, social customs, and questions of morality across national boundaries in the context of migration from Turkey to Germany. The film centers on an impossible love relationship between a Turkish woman and a German engineer that is subjected to negative pressure from both cultures. Of interest to scholars and critics of exilic and diasporic cinema, Berlin in Berlin also became known in Turkey for a scene in which Hülya Avşar is portrayed masturbating.

BESHARA, KHAIRY (1947–)

This New Realist filmmaker also facilitated the rebirth of documentary cinema in Egypt. Born in Tanta, he graduated from the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema in 1967, after which he studied filmmaking in Poland on fellowship. He directed several documentaries during the mid-1970s through the early 1980s and served as an assistant director on Diary of a Country Prosecutor (Tawfik Saleh, 1969). He then began directing features. The Necklace and the Bracelet (1986) analyzes the social conditions of women’s oppression in a poor rural village in which many men have left to seek work in cities. The film resists the common tendency in Egyptian cinema to stereotype Nubians (black African Berbers, or barbaris). His subsequent Sweet Day, Bitter Day (1988) is a postmelodrama about a poor Cairene widow (Faten Hamama) with three children whose inopportune life choices, determined by social conditions, lead to misfortune and unhappiness. In the 1990s, Beshara shifted generic gears away from realism, making Crabs (1990), an extremely successful musical featuring rising star Ahmed Zaki. It was followed by Ice Cream in Glym (1992), another cross-class musical romance, critically reminiscent of Abdel Halim Hafez vehicles, starring popular teen idol Amr Diab and set in the titular village outside Alexandria. Of Coptic background, Beshara has referred to himself as culturally Islamic. He has taught cinema at the Higher Institute of Cinema and experiments with digital filmmaking. In 2012, he released an experimental docudrama, Moondog, a subjectivized entry into Beshara’s own thought processes and points of view as personified through the perspective of a dog and shot mostly in the United States over a period of 11 years.

BEUR CINEMA

Beur filmmakers comprise a generation of Arab and Amazigh cineastes who are the product of cross-cultural upbringings, with blood ties to their parents’ homelands in North Africa but otherwise rooted in Europe. Technically, beurs are French only—although Belgians are sometimes included; they represent an ethnographic category that emerged following the passage of French immigration and naturalization laws and as a result of colonialism. The term beur is French inversion slang for arabe and refers to the French-born children of North African (Maghrebi) immigrants of Arab as well as Amazigh/Kabyle origin. Also a pun on beurre, the French word for “butter” and phonetically short for “Berber,” it has come to signify the ambivalence associated with bicultural identity. “La génération beur” attained prominence during the late 1970s and 1980s amid increasing racial tensions, the rise of extreme right-wing movements, and national debates across Europe about immigration, integration, and assimilation. Many beur films have been set in the suburbs of Paris and other large French cities, where immigrants from the former colonial possessions are concentrated, hence the term banlieue (French for “suburb”) cinema, which overlaps with and has been used interchangeably with beur cinema.

During the 1970s, the operative term for this grouping of films was cinémas de l’émigration, the usual focus of which was social or political. Included in this period are the early films of the Algerian Ali Akika: Journey to the Capital (1977) and Tears of Blood (1980). In Belgium, Mohamed Ben Salah, born in 1945 in Oran, directed a low-budget feature, Some People and Others (1972), a firsthand account of the problems and pressures of immigrant life. Mohamed Benayat, born in 1944 in Algeria and an Algerian citizen brought to France at the age of four, was active directing films during the 1970s and 1980s. They included The Mask of an Enlightened Woman (1974), Savage Barricades (1975), The New Romantics (1979), Child of the Stars (1985), and Stallion (1988). Abdelkrim Bahloul, born in 1950 in Algeria and also an Algerian citizen, emigrated to France during his teens; he has directed Mint Tea (1984), A Vampire in Paradise (1991), The Hamlet Sisters (1996), The Night of Destiny (1997), and The Assassinated Sun (2004). Other prominent and representative beur filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s include Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, Nadia Fares, Abdellatif Kechiche, Djamila Sahraoui, Saïd Ould-Khelifa, Farouk Beloufa, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche, Bourlem Guerdjou, Malik Chibane, Rachid Bouchareb, Mehdi Charef, Ali Ghalem, Belkacem Hadjadj, Okacha Touita, Mahmoud Zemmouri, Amor Hakkar, and Karim Dridi. Some beur cinema figures have moved back and forth between France and North Africa: an example is Nadir Moknèche (The Harem of Madame Osmane, 1999), who was born in Paris in 1965, grew up in Algeria, but has been living mainly in France since the age of 18.

The term beur, however, remains loosely applied and is increasingly seen to be outmoded—and in some circles offensive—as filmmakers move away from the exploration of migration, racism, and possibilities of integration into French society, commonly producing work that touches only tangentially on the diasporic experience, and thus abandon relatively realist portrayals of banlieue life for genre films, such as comedies, thrillers, and historical costume dramas, supported by the development of stars such as Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, and Gad Elmaleh. In this context, critic Will Higbee has contextualized a post-beur filmmaking practice already apparent by the turn of the 21st century, one that is characteristically transnational in its combining of the local and the global, and that is also a part of French national cinema. French-born Jamel Bensalah’s Boys on the Beach (1999), featuring Debbouze and set outside the banlieue, stimulated demand for further comedies, including Bensalah’s own subsequent hits Beur sur la ville (2011) and Neuilly sa mère, sa mère! (codirected with Gabriel Julien-Lafferière, 2018). By contrast Rachid Bouchareb met considerable critical as well as popular acclaim for his dramatic historical re-creation Days of Glory (2006), featuring Debbouze, Naceri, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila, a period drama depicting the role of North Africans in the defeat of Nazism and the liberation of France during World War II; his Outside the Law (2010), on the other hand, with the same stars, concerns the effect on such Maghrebi immigrants of the Algerian war of liberation from France. In Smuggler’s Songs (2011) and The Story of Judas (2015), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche also turned to period costume films, relying on actors of Maghrebi descent playing roles quite different from those associated with beur cinema; his subsequent film festival favorite South Terminal (2019) presents a dystopian vision of an unnamed society, apparently based on the civil strife in turn-of-the-century Algeria. Abdellatif Kechiche has also made a period film, Black Venus (2010), a biopic based on the life of Saartjie Baartman, but has more recently focused on the exploration of (homo)sexual relationships, notably in Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), a film exemplary of auteurist art cinema.

BEYZAI (BAYZAI), BAHRAM (1938–)

A scholar of theatrical traditions from around the world, Beyzai was a key figure both of the Iranian New Wave and the revitalized auteur cinema that flourished in Iran in the 1990s. He studied theater and film at Tehran University, where he proceeded to teach, and wrote many novels, plays, and puppet plays before first turning to narrative film in the 1970s. His work consistently references theatrical traditions, folklore, and myth; it has also regularly met with censorship both before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is perhaps partly explained by his tendency to foreground strong female characters.

Beyzai’s first feature, Downpour (1972), is a relatively straightforward mystery. The motif of a stranger’s arrival is replayed in The Stranger and the Fog (1975), which shows the influence of the traditional Shi‘i passion play, or taz’ieh. The Crow (1977), now lost, depicts the loss of personal and societal identity and has been read as an allegory for the Pahlavi regime. Two films completed at the time of the Iranian Revolution, The Ballad of Tara (1978) and The Death of Yazdgerd (1980), both mythological and allegorical tales featuring Susan Taslimi, were and remain banned in Iran, apparently for their depiction of unveiled women. In the former, Taslimi plays the keeper of a powerful sword, a similarly totemic figure as Nai’i, who takes in a war-orphaned refugee from the south of Iran in Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986), a key film in establishing Iranian cinema’s reputation for a deep humanism at the end of the 1980s, but which did not receive an exhibition permit in Iran until 1989.

Maybe Some Other Time (1988) is a self-reflexive mystery story, referencing Beyzai’s own The Crow, of a woman (Taslimi in her last Iranian role) searching for her family and identity. These themes recur in The Travellers (1992), which again utilizes distanciation techniques reminiscent of taz’ieh, such as direct address, in the context of a story about a family who die on their way to a wedding but eventually reappear, alive, through the force of the matriarch’s refusal to believe in their deaths. Killing Rabid Dogs (2001) took many years to complete; it is a dark urban thriller, easily interpreted as a critique of the Islamic regime, set in the years immediately following the revolution, which depicts the oppression of intellectuals. When We Are All Asleep (2009) is nominally the story of a woman negotiatng a new relationship after her husband and child have been killed in a car accident; however, the film is highly self-reflexive, with a film crew attempting to shoot the film, multiple actors playing the same role, and different roles and films overlapping so that the “real” is effectively unidentifiable. Since 2010, Beyzai has been mostly resident in the United States, where he has been teaching Persian culture at Stanford University. In October, 2019 Beyzai was one of many luminaries of the Iranian film industry both at home and abroad to sign a statement objecting to increasing obstacles to film production and exhibition in the country.

BLACK HONEY (2010)

Directed by Khaled Marei, this very popular comedy, particularly among young Egyptian adults who have been exposed to North American and European culture, and Third Culture Kids, is a reverse migration narrative, in which the main character, a diasporic Egyptian named Masry Sayed El Arabi (literally, the Egyptian Arab Master) returns to the homeland at the age of 30 and is compelled to adjust to a place where the kindness of strangers has been replaced with opportunism and deceit, but where redemption occurs as the protagonist manages to find his parents’ apartment and is taken in by his childhood friend and the latter’s family. The film offers a light critique of Egyptian culture and society before resolving to reinforce nationalistic stereotypes and sentiments in the course of making frequent intertextual references to recognizable cultural figures and occasions (alash). Its central conflict revolves around Masry’s refusal to use his U.S. passport and, in that context, his desire not to be treated as a foreigner (khawaga). Upon arrival in Cairo, he is extorted by an airport taxi driver, and he is subsequently granted several privileges on account of his perceived foreignness, but is later left to fend for himself and suffer the trials and tribulations of everyday life in a country with which he has difficulty connecting on a social and emotional level. With an estimated 4.7 percent of Egyptians living outside the country, Black Honey along with other mainstream films, such as You Fly (Ahmed El Guindi, 2009), addresses the dilemma of diasporic living and the desire for home.

BOSTA (2005)

Before the international film festival success of Under the Bombs (2007), filmmaker Philippe Aractingi and producer Christian Catafago successfully brought to the screen this first fully Lebanese feature film. Using an entirely Lebanese cast and crew, they acquired financing from Lebanese businessmen to make a postwar road musical centered on the Lebanese national dance, the dabkeh. Bosta attempts to channel postwar anxiety through a story of renaissance and rejuvenation. Kamal, who lost his father during the Lebanese Civil War, reconvenes his now-closed school’s dance troupe in order to compete in the national dabkeh competition; he rebels against the traditional conventions of dabkeh, pushing a new, modern approach. This theme serves as a thinly veiled commentary about the way youth must deal with the baggage of the past in postwar Lebanon. Once accepted for competition, Kamal and his troupe travel around the country in a brightly colored bus, singing and dancing their way to personal resolution—including Kamal’s romantic relationship with Alia (Nadine Labaki)—and national unity. Bosta garnered large audience support and recouped the money invested in its production, thus proving to Lebanese financiers that Lebanese cinema could be profitable.

BOUAMARI, MOHAMED (1941–2006)

Born in Algeria but raised in France, Bouamari returned to Algeria in 1965 to work at the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques as an assistant director for Gillo Pontecorvo, Ahmed Rachedi, and Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, while also making his own short films. His first feature, The Charcoal Burner (1972), catapulted Bouamari to attention, as it set a precedent for interrogating rural transformations following the Algerian revolution. His subsequent films—The Heritage (1974), First Steps (1978), and Refusal (1982)—analyze the conditions of women and their social emancipation. Also an actor, Bouamari has appeared in some noteworthy Algerian films, including The Citadel (Mohamed Chouikh, 1988) and Enough! (Djamila Sahraoui, 2006). During the 1990s, however, his work was targeted by Islamists, and he was forced into temporary exile in France. There, at the end of 2006, while in production on his film Le Mouton de Fort-Montluc, which concerns prisoners condemned to death in 1958 for having participated in the Algerian revolution, he died suddenly and unexpectedly; the film has not been completed.

BOUCHAREB, RACHID (1953[1956?]–)

Born in France to Algerian parents, Bouchareb studied cinema at the Centre d’Études et de Recherches de l’Image et du Son, then directed films for French television (SFP, TF1, Antenne 2). Recognized for critically reflecting a “global village” in which different cultures coexist in mutual ignorance, Bouchareb’s films project themes of alienation, marginalization, and exile and narrate stories of immigration, identity crisis, the search for home, and the return to origins. He has filmed in Africa, Vietnam, the United States, and Europe, and many of his films have been short-listed for Academy Awards.

Bouchareb’s first feature, Baton Rouge (1985), tells an ostensibly true story of three Parisian friends who, inspired by the Rolling Stones rock group, decide to emigrate to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The film recounts their adventures until their expulsion by the immigration services. His second film, Cheb (1991), a pointed critique of the French policy of deporting “immigrants” for petty crimes, focuses on Merwan, a 19-year-old beur who has been expelled from France and forced to return to Algeria, where he was born, but where he now finds the language and customs quite alien. The Algerian authorities confiscate his passport and enroll him in mandatory military service—in the desert—where other soldiers constantly remind him of his foreignness. Swapping passports with a Frenchman he encounters, he reenters France but is conscripted once again into army service. In Little Senegal (2000), Alloune, a tour guide in a museum to the notorious slave island Gorée, traces the path of his ancestors, who were sold into North American slavery, to Harlem, United States, where he discovers Ida, a forceful kiosk owner who has no interest in her African roots.

Bouchareb’s interest in the North African experience abroad is continued with his Days of Glory (2006), a suspenseful, action-packed war film in the tradition of the Hollywood genre that exposes the exploitation of North African soldiers who either volunteered for or were conscripted into the Gaullist forces during World War II. With the exception of the less widely distributed Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene, 1987), the role of Africans in this primarily European war had been ignored, if not largely forgotten, prior to Bouchareb’s cinematic intervention. In 2010, Bouchareb directed Outside the Law (2010), with the same stars: Djamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila. In this genre film, which he claims was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969), Bouchareb revisits the history of the Algerian war of liberation in France. The film focuses on three Algerian brothers whose lives diverged before the struggle for independence reunites them in Paris at a decisive moment in the conflict. The mise-en-scène uses all the tropes of the thriller and culminates in the evocation of the violent reprisals against the peaceful demonstrations of Algerian families on 17 October 1961.

BOUGHEDIR, FÉRID (1944–)

A self-taught filmmaker, but also a historian, theorist, and film critic for Jeune Afrique magazine, Boughedir was born in Hammam-Lif, Tunisia. He studied in both Paris and Rome, earning a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in African and Arab cinema, as well as a diploma in cinema studies. During the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as an academic film critic and a documentarian of cinema, writing key commentaries on the history and present state of the medium in Africa, African Cinema from A to Z and The Cinema in Africa and in the World, and directing the documentaries African Camera (1983) and Camera Arabe: The Young Arab Cinema (1987, edited by Moufida Tlatli), thus becoming one of the most important intellectual theorists of Arab cinema. Boughedir’s contribution to film theory includes a schematic classification system that categorizes films based on the relationship ascertainable between their estimable audience effects and the theoretical positions of their directors. This system refers to directors as auteurs and includes categories that describe political, moral, commercial, cultural, self-expressive, and narcissistic-intellectual functions of cinema.

Boughedir’s early work in fictional filmmaking consisted of contributing an episode to the collective feature In the Land of the Tararani (1972), codirecting Murky Death (with Claude d’Anna, 1970), and assistant-directing several foreign productions. In 1990, however, Boughedir made his first film as sole director, the acclaimed Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces, a male rite-of-passage story that was screened widely at international film festivals and which remains the most financially successful of all Tunisian films. Halfaouine was followed by another popular success, A Summer in La Goulette (1995). His Zizou / Spring Perfume (2016) concerns a young migrant from the countryside who moves to Tunis and in 2011 finds a job setting up satellite dishes, which brings him into the homes of a wide range of Tunisians with very different views on the Arab Uprisings.

BOUHMOUCH, NADIR (1990‒)

Born in Casablanca and raised in Rabat, Bouhmouch is a filmmaker and social activist whose documentaries stand as a challenge to the official discourse of Moroccan cinema. Funding for them has mostly been raised from individuals, including through crowd-sourcing, as in the case of Makhzen and Me (2011), which discusses the 20th February movement, named for the protest in February 2011—a part of the Arab Uprisings—in support of political reform, in which Bouhmouch has been active. His 475: When Marriage becomes Punishment (2013) explores the case of 16-year-old rape victim Amina, who committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist. Basta! (2013) was a product of Guerilla Cinema, a filmmaking collective in which Boumouch participates that opposes expensive production requirements and the need for permits; the film details the attempt to get authorization for a film shoot from the state-run film agency, the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM). Amussu (2019) is a documentary, but also a musical, in the Tamazight (or Berber) language, about a group of Amazigh villagers who have shut down a pipeline that diverted water from their almond grove to a silver mine. Citing comparisons with restrictions on water use among Palestinians in Israel, as well as the destruction of Palestinian film culture, Boumouch declined an invitation to show his film at the Israeli documentary film festival DocAviv.

Bouhmouch has advocated Saharawi self-determination, attending FiSahara in 2013 and narrating the story of the Green March of 1975—the event that began the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara—at the start of Life Is Waiting (Iara Lee, 2015), a film about artistic responses to occupation and displacement. He has also written against Martin Scorsese’s attendance at the Marrakech International Film Festival, where the American had claimed to be “home,” lending implicit support to the Moroccan regime. Recently, Bouhmouch has been writing and photographing for Al Jazeera English.

BOULANE, AHMED (1956–)

Ahmed Boulane began his artistic career in the 1970s as an actor for Moroccan theater and television. In the 1980s, he began working as an assistant director, then became a well-known casting director and an actor in more than 25 international films. His company, Boulane O’Byrne Productions, offers casting and production services in Morocco for international film and television projects. His first feature, Ali, Rabia and the Others (2000), starring Hiam Abbass, treats Ali’s difficult return from prison to encounter those he knew as a hippie youth in the 1960s, during Morocco’s Years of Lead, all of whom have taken different paths. The Satanic Angels (2007) is based on a true story that raised an outcry over freedom of artistic expression in Morocco in the late 1990s: the controversial arrest of 14 young Moroccan rock musicians accused of antisocial behavior contrary to Islam. The Son’s Return (2012) focuses on the difficulties experienced by a son born to a French mother and a Moroccan father in coming to terms with his own origins. Boulane also directed La Isla de Perijil (2015), a comic depiction of nationalist sentiments about a soldier stationed on an island, jurisdiction over which is contested between Morocco and Spain.

BOUREKAS

Named after a stuffed pastry indigenous to Turkey, the börek, the bourekas genre of Israeli filmmaking places uneducated, poor, and working-class Mizrahi characters into awkward and unlikely predicaments, the pain and contradictions of which are ameliorated through musical numbers and slapstick comedy. Bourekas films are examples of orientalism: they rehearse Western stereotypes meant at once to promote assimilation of Mizrahi Jews into Ashkenazi-dominated society and to construct Israeli identity in the image of a fetishized “Orient.” The most renowned bourekas film is Sallach Shabbati (Ephraim Kishon, 1964), a musical comedy starring Fiddler on the Roof’s Haim Topol as a Yemeni immigrant to Israel whose son falls in love with an Ashkenazi kibbutznik (Gila Almagor). Ra’anan Alexandrowicz would later name one of the characters in his James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003) after Shabbati. Also noteworthy is The Policeman (Kishon, 1970), the star of which, Shaike Ophir, was frequently cast in Mizrahi roles. With the advent of Young Israeli Cinema, a post-bourekas genre emerged that ostensibly took more seriously the conditions and aspirations of Mizrahi Israelis. Examples include Queen of the Road (Menachem Golan, 1971), The House on Chelouche Street (Moshe Mizrahi, 1973), Sh’chur (Shmuel Hasfari, 1994), and Three Mothers (Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006)—all of which feature Almagor.

BOUZID, NOURI (1945–)

Born in Sfax, Tunisia, Bouzid studied film at the Institut National des Arts du Spectacle et Technique de la Diffusion in Belgium from 1968 to 1972. Back in Tunisia (1972–1973), Bouzid worked for Radio-Télévision Tunisienne, then was arrested and imprisoned (1973–1979) for membership in the leftist Groupe des Études et d’action Socialistes Tunisienne. He worked subsequently on numerous Tunisian and international films before writing and directing his own features. These works have addressed social taboos, especially around gender and sexuality, by locating their root causes in the related phenomena of social division and political exploitation.

Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (1986) is a landmark film in the history of Tunisian cinema, noteworthy for its analysis of male sexuality that involves positioning the sexual abuse of young boys by an older male authority figure as a key narrative element, and for its recognizable lament of Tunisia’s lost Jewish community. Golden Horseshoes (1989) derives from Bouzid’s own prison experiences, as its formerly incarcerated protagonist is tormented by memories of torture and violence. Bezness (1992) analyzes the problem of sex tourism on the streets and beaches of Tunisia’s tourist towns through the contemporary story of a poor young man who, while attempting to earn money from foreign visitors through prostitution, claims to follow Muslim tradition when dealing strictly with his sister. Bent Familia (aka Tunisiennes) (1997) offers an intimate portrait of three middle-aged women in contemporary Tunisia: Aida, a tough, brash professor who is divorced and unashamed of her sexuality; Fatiha, a shy Algerian refugee who has suffered violent abuse in her own country and fears for her remaining loved ones; and Amina, the film’s central character, who seeks strength to cope with her confining, authoritarian husband. Clay Dolls (2002) continues Bouzid’s practice of interweaving character perspectives through montage and nonlinear narratives, to analyze the emotional and psychological survival strategies of two young, rebellious rural women, Fedhah and Rebeh (Hend Sabri), recruited to work as domestic servants in the homes of wealthy Tunisian families. Making Of (2005) addresses the lure of Islamism for young Tunisians acting in response to political repression and economic disadvantage.

In addition to directing, Bouzid adapted and scripted several acclaimed Tunisian films during the 1990s, including Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces (1990) and A Summer in La Goulette (1995) and Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace (1994) and Season of Men (2000). He is also a significant critic of Arab cinema, having written the important essay “New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema” (1988), among other works. Bouzid founded the Tunis École des Arts et du Cinéma in 1994, where he still teaches. He has also taught film in the Faculty of Philosophy of La Manouba University in Tunis and at the Film Institute in Gammarth. Bouzid was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in France in 1992 and the Presidential Prize of the Cinema in Tunisia in 1998, as well as the 2007 Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for his work in challenging injustice and promoting critical thought in Arab society.

Bouzid has made two films since the 2011 revolution that complete a trilogy begun with Making Of (2009). The first, Millefeuille (2013), focuses on two young female friends who are seeking out spaces where they can free themselves from the pressures imposed on them by families, friends, and coworkers. This takes place at a time when, paradoxically, the Arab Uprisings provide them with a glimpse of a new and more equitable social order. The Scarecrows (2019) recounts the return of two women from Syria to Tunisia. Volunteers for the Islamist forces, they have been sequestered and sexually abused. One, Djo, has lost the capacity to talk but writes compulsively wherever she can, on loose sheets of paper, notebooks, or even on the walls; the other, Zina, finds solace in a friendship with a gay man who provides her with temporary shelter.

BRIDE, THE (1973)

This first installment of Lütfi Ö. Akad’s migration trilogy focuses on a rural Turkish family’s troubled attempt to survive and adapt to life in urban Istanbul. As with the trilogy’s subsequent installments, The Wedding (1973) and Blood Money (1974), The Bride centers on the challenges faced by women under such conditions. Hülya Koçyiğit plays Meryem, a woman who must abandon her traditional role as a housewife for work in a factory. In Blood Money, the plot is slightly revised, as Meryem migrates from a village to Istanbul with her two children.