Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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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