Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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films have examined the uneasy neocolonial relationship between Algeria and France.
Tamanrasset (2007) is a made-for-television film set in the south of Algeria that depicts the plight of African immigrants from Mali who cross the border in the hope of eventually getting to Europe. Set in Mostaganem, a port city, the title of Alloauche’s Harragas (2009)—literally “those who burn”—references the stories of migrants to Europe. He has been prolific throughout the 2010s, as he continues to explore the tensions, trauma, and violence in contemporary Algerian culture. In Normal! (2011), Allouache presents a self-reflexive interrogation of cinema and censorship, as a group of young people watch and critique a film in progress, while in The Repentant (2012), a militant Islamist (Nabil Asli) decides to give up his weapons and attempts unsuccessfully to reintegrate into civil society. The Rooftops (2013) explores the trajectories of different protagonists over the course of a day as they confront the absence of prospects and the violence of a divided culture. The title of Madame Courage (2015) refers to a powerful drug that can be bought on the streets, and is another indictment of contemporary Algerian society. The film focuses on Omar—possibly a reference to Allouache’s own Omar Gatlato—a petty thief who spends his life on the street or at home listening to the religious preachers his mother watches on television, but who falls in love with Selma, whom he had been prepared to rob. Enquête au Paradis (2017), a docu-fiction on religious indoctrination, follows a journalist who interviews various young people who have been listening to religious sermons. Effectively, the film questions the future of a country whose rulers, Allouache believes, have chosen to accede to the demands of religious groups.
ALMAGOR, GILA (1939–)
One of Israel’s foremost actresses, Gila Almagor has starred in countless Israeli films and stage plays. She is perhaps most famous for her roles in The Summer of Aviya (1988) and its sequel, Under the Domim Tree (1995), both directed by Eli Cohen and based on autobiographical novels recounting Almagor’s childhood and young adulthood in Israel, during which she and her mother, a Holocaust survivor, faced difficulty assimilating into Israeli society and its ersatz Middle Eastern milieu. Almagor’s embodiment of the Zionist imperative for Jews to assimilate an idealized “Oriental” culture while rejecting actual Jewish–Arab history is palpable in the bourekas film Sallach Shabbati (Ephraim Kishon, 1964), a musical comedy in which she plays an Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) kibbutznik who falls in love with a Mizrahi (Arab Jewish) immigrant, and in The House on Chelouche Street (Moshe Mizrahi, 1973), a post-bourekas melodrama in which Almagor offers one of Israeli cinema’s early sympathetic portrayals of a Mizrahi woman struggling to survive against the odds. Likewise, in Siege (Gilberto Tofano, 1969), a poetic realist work of the Young Israeli Cinema, Almagor plays a war widow who allegorizes a nostalgic, almost mythological buttressing of Zionism in the context of Israel’s demographic reconfiguration following the Six-Day War.
Upon massive Mizrahi defection from the moderate Labor Party to the right-wing Likud Party throughout the 1980s, Almagor returned to less progressive Mizrahi roles in, for instance, Sh’chur (Shmuel Hasfari, 1994), Passover Fever (Shemi Zarhin, 1995), and, much later, Three Mothers (Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006), in which she appears as a paradigmatic maternal figure. Almagor’s later films include The Debt (Assaf Bernstein, 2007), in which she plays a former Mossad agent who assists in the capture of a Nazi war criminal, and Mossad (Alan Gur Arye, 2019), a parody in which Mossad and CIA agents must work together to rescue an American billionaire who has been kidnapped. See also ISRAELI OCCUPATION; ORIENTALISM; WOMEN.
AL-MANSOUR, HAIFAA (1974–)
Raised in eastern Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf, Haifaa Al-Mansour studied comparative literature at the American University of Cairo in Egypt, then completed a master’s degree in directing and film studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. Award-winning short films Who? (1997), The Bitter Departure (2000), and The Only Way Out (2001) preceded her feature-length documentary Women in the Shadows (2005) and her narrative feature Wadjda (2012), both of which examine limits to mobility for women in Saudi Arabia. After living in Bahrain, she moved with her husband and two children to the United States, where she has directed a Hollywood biopic on Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley (2017), and the African American rom-com Nappily Ever After (2018). Al-Mansour is the first recipient of the Saudi Film Council grant—for The Perfect Candidate (2019), about the issue of male guardianship.
AL-QATTAN, OMAR (1964–)
Born in Beirut, educated at Oxford and Belgium’s Institut National Supérieur des arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion, Al-Qattan was assistant and executive producer on a number of Palestinian films in the late 1980s, including some by Michel Khleifi. He has directed four documentaries: Dreams and Silence (1991), a portrait of a Palestinian refugee in Jordan; Going Home (1995), the recollections of an ex–British Mandate army major; made-for-television Muhammad, Legacy of a Prophet (2002), a reconstruction of contemporary rituals evoking the Prophet’s life; and Diary of an Arts Competition / Under Occupation (2002), a record of an art exhibition organized during the Al-Aqsa Intifada’s West Bank curfews. Al-Qattan has also produced educational Arabic-language CD-ROMs (under Sindibad Multimedia, which he founded); is a trustee of the A. M. Qattan Foundation, an independent Palestinian cultural and educational organization based in Ramallah; and, in 2004, launched the Palestinian Audio-Visual Programme (PAV). PAV runs cinema clubs in schools across the Occupied Palestinian Territories and offers grants to young filmmakers and artists.
AL-RAHEB, WAHA (1960–)
Born in Cairo, Egypt, to Syrian parents, Damascus-based Waha Al-Raheb is a filmmaker, actress, and writer. Educated in France, Al-Raheb published a thesis on women in Syrian cinema from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. With a career spanning movie and television projects, she wrote and directed the 2003 film Dreamy Visions, the first Syrian feature made by a woman. Integrating surreal moments of fantasy, the film focuses on a highly intelligent but oppressed young woman who finally rebels and leaves home to become a guerrilla fighter in Lebanon. Al-Raheb herself plays a neighbor and friend who is also traumatized by patriarchy. Al-Raheb was challenged by censorship both during stages of development of her screenplay in Syria and, according to the filmmaker, in attempts to get her film screened at film festivals abroad in the post-9/11 era due to its political content.
AL-THAWADI, BASSAM (1960–)
Educated at the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema and instrumental in the development of the Bahrain Radio and Television Corporation, Bassam Al-Thawadi has produced and directed three feature films, The Barrier (1990), The Visitor (2004), and A Bahraini Tale: A True Story (2006). The Barrier is considered the first narrative feature ever made in Bahrain. The Visitor employs the thriller genre to offer social commentary about generational malaise. A Bahraini Tale examines social tensions, including violence against women, in Bahrain in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab‒Israeli War, as a sense of community begins to fragment along religious (Sunni, Shi‘a, Jewish) and ethnic (Arab, Afro-Arab, Iranian) lines. Al-Thawadi has also produced films directed by other Bahrainis, including Four Girls (Hussain Abbas Al-Hulaybi, 2007), about four young women trying to start a business. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the fifth edition of the Gulf Film Festival in 2012.
ALSHARIF, BASMA (1983–)
This experimental film director studied filmmaking at the University of Illinois. Her short films Home Movies Gaza (2013), O, Persecuted (2014), and Deep Sleep (2014) represent esoteric meditations on Palestinian history and Alsharif’s identity as a Palestinian in the diaspora. In 2017, Alsharif produced