Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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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,