Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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Pegasus of the title that can temporarily release them from their worldly burdens, until they finally realize that they cannot escape their destiny. Sound and image in this film often operate separately, with a narrator talking over fixed shots, including of walls, or other shots that evoke an enclosed space but are devoid of depth. Tarfaya (2004), the name of a seaside village across from the Canary Islands, follows Miriam, who arrives there from an unspecified location, determined to reach the Spanish border. In Tarfaya time stands still, and migration seems the only viable option for a range of isolated characters who, seeking solace and humanity, cross one another’s paths in a vast desert landscape.
Waiting for Pasolini (2007) is based on the conceit that when Italian auteur Pier Paulo Pasolini shot Oedipus Rex in Morocco in 1966, he befriended a man, Thami, who worked as an extra. Forty years later, when a new Italian film crew arrives, Thami expects to reencounter his friend. Based partly on a documentary, Ouarzarzate Movie (Ali Essafi, 2001), about extras working in and around Ouarzarzate, Waiting for Pasolini has been seen as a critique of neocolonialism in the Moroccan fim industry and transnational cinema. Drawing further on the relationship between everyday life and postcolonial cinema, The Mosk (2010) refers intertextually to Waiting for Pasolini and concerns the set of a mosque built for the earlier film that subsequently becomes the village mosque. Moha, the owner of the field on which the mosque was built as a set piece, now wants to reclaim his property, much to the dismay of the community. Subsequently, Aoulad-Syad has completed further features: Zmane Kenza and Sebate: The Shoe (both comedies made for Moroccan television in 2012) and The Desert Voices (2018).
AR, MÜJDE (1954–)
The daughter of a famous songwriter, Ar began her career as a model and theatrical performer before acting in a television series in 1974. While appearing in various genre films during the 1970s, including comedies, action-adventures, and melodramas, Ar became the paradigmatic star figure in the women’s films of the late Yeşilçam period. In these films, which focused on the social conditions of women in Turkey, Ar often portrayed strong female characters who try, despite patriarchal pressures, to achieve self-determination. Still active as a performer and television personality, Ar has since appeared as the stereotypical attractive passionate woman in Fahriye, the Older Sister (Yavuz Turgul, 1987) and My Aunt (Halit Refiğ, 1986) and as the enigmatic and unknowable woman of male fantasies in Atıf Yılmaz’s Her Name Is Vasfiye (1985) and Aaah Belinda (1986).
ARAB FILM DISTRIBUTION (AFD)
Located in Seattle, Washington, AFD (Typecast Films) is the largest distributor of Arab and Middle Eastern cinema in North America. Starting with five films in 1990 after the first-ever Arab film festival in the United States at the Goodwill Arts Games in Seattle, AFD’s inventory has since multiplied 100-fold to include features, documentaries, and short films from the Middle East, Maghreb, and South Asia, as well as exilic and diasporic Arab cinema produced in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Providing material available for sale and rental for home and institutional uses, and for the festival circuits, AFD remains one of the few dedicated sources in North America for Arab cinema.
ARAB UPRISINGS (ARAB SPRING)
This wave of mass protests that took place across the Arab region in 2010–2011 culminated 20 years of popular discontent with the dire socioeconomic effects of neoliberal structural-adjustment policies that had been implemented throughout much of the Middle East by military and autocratic regimes in the decades following the Cold War. In Tunisia (where the events are known as the Jasmine Spring), Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, despotic regimes were overthrown, with dictators either resigning or being removed from power, and in turn either being killed or imprisoned. However, in every case excepting Tunisia, where the forced resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January 2011 has been followed by a period of relatively peaceful revolution—although a subsequent economic slump has led to much disillusionment and resentment mainly among youth, particularly in the south—counterrevolutions or ongoing civil and military crises, often exacerbated by foreign interference, have all but negated the liberationist momentum. In Egypt, two years after the February 2011 resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist, was deposed in a coup staged by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In Yemen, the November 2011 deposing of President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been followed by a civil and military crisis in which, in response to the rebellion of Shi‘i Houthis from the north of the country, supported by Iran, an ongoing bombing campaign was launched by Saudi Arabia, with military support and encouragement from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, and the additional involvement of the United Arab Emirates. Saudi forces also assisted the conservative monarchy of Hamad ibn ‘Isa Al Khalifah in Bahrain in its suppression of protests that began there in March 2011. In Syria, also, President Bashar al-Assad has retained power amid a nearly decade-long civil and military crisis, notwithstanding attempts to remove him extending back to March 2011; the regime’s resilience has been attributed on the one hand to its socialist past and related historical alliance with the USSR/Russia, and on the other hand to its alliance along a non-Sunni Islamic axis with Iran.
Numerous films about, or set in the midst of, the Arab Uprisings have been made in the Middle East region. In Tunisia, many people in the film industry actively supported and participated in the January 2011 revolution. The period stirred up considerable activity in all areas of Tunisian cultural life, leading to the production of several documentaries that looked at Tunisian history-in-the-making. Noteworthy among them are Rouge parole (Elyes Baccar, 2011) and Fallega 2011: Candles in Al-Kasbah (Rafik Omrani, 2011). In the latter, the leaders of the revolution discuss and define the terms for analyzing their actions and any future engagements. In addition, well-known directors of feature films have turned to documentary in order to make postrevolutionary statements. These include Nadia El Fani (Laïcité Inch’Allah [2011], an exploration of secularism that led to El Fani being banned from entering Tunisia) and Kaouther Ben Hania (The Blade of Tunis [2013], an allegory of media hype and misinformation). Narrative features about the Tunisian uprisings are also prolific and include auteur vehicles Millefueille (Nouri Bouzid, 2013), which portrays two women’s search for gender equality following the revolution; Zizou / Spring Perfume (Férid Boughedir, 2016), about a rural migrant to the urban center who gains multiple perspectives on the revolution through his work in television satellite installation; the Bidoun series (Saad Jilani, 2012–2019), an exploration of youth rebelliousness under conditions of revolutionary change; and As I Open My Eyes (Leïla Bouzid, 2015), which examines the first stirrings of the uprising in Tunisia.
Elsewhere in the Maghreb, Algerian cinema has engaged the Arab Uprisings since their onset, a fact ever more salient in the face of the country’s April 2019 overthrow of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Sonia Chamkhi, for example, who like her Tunisian counterparts moved into documentary in the wake of the uprisings, made Militantes (2012), about women running for national office; while Karim Moussaoui directed Until the Birds Return (aka The Nature of Time) (2017), a narrative feature critiquing the limitations of individualism for revolutionary struggle. Earlier, in Morocco, activist filmmaker Nadir Bouhmouch directed Makhzen and Me (2011), a documentary that focuses on the February 2011 political reform movement in that country, where to date a revolution has not taken place. In the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, however, protests at the Gdeim Izik camp outside the capital El Ayoun in November 2010, which were suppressed by Moroccan forces, have been seen by some commentators as a precursor of the events of 2011.
Perhaps the internationally most spectacular site of the 2011 uprisings was Egypt, where short actualités of the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir