Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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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