Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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told through the device of a bar owner who tries to keep at least one Jew in the village so that his bar won’t be closed, while The Forgotten People of History (2009) deals with taboos, in particular slavery and sexual exploitation, through the story of Yamna, who is thrown out of her home for not being a virgin and recruited by an organization that forces her to become a prostitute in Europe.
BENLYAZID (BELYAZID), FARIDA (1948–)
Farida Benlyazid is a Moroccan journalist, documentarian, screenwriter, and filmmaker known for her representations of women’s lives in scripts and personal films that often depict their oppression and attempts at liberation from patriarchy. Benlyazid studied cinema at the École Supérieure des Études Cinématographiques in Paris, from which she graduated in 1976. She returned to Morocco in the early 1980s, where she made a television film, Identité de femmes (1979), and scripted two films (A Hole in the Wall [1978] and Reed Dolls [1981]) for her husband, filmmaker Jilali Ferhati, before turning to her own feature filmmaking with A Door to the Sky (1988). She scripted two features for Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi: Badis (1988) and Looking for the Husband of My Wife (1993). Her next three directorial features were adaptations: Women’s Wiles (1999), based on a historical fairy tale; Casablanca Casablanca (2002); and The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni (2005), based on the novel by Angel Vazques. After an eight-year gap, in 2013 she directed Frontieras, about the political division of the Sahara.
BENSAÏDI, FAOUZI (1967–)
Born in Meknès, Morocco, Bensaïdi is an actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker who has contributed to the development of screenwriting and pioneered new directions in film aesthetics in Morocco. Trained in Rabat and Paris, he worked as a theater director before turning to film directing. His short The Cliff (1998) received many awards, as did the subsequent Le Mur (2000) and Trajets (2000). Attending rigorously to framing and shot composition, Bensaïdi weaves film form and narrative together in a relentless exploration of the impossibility of communication and the violence inherent in closed, conservative, class-bound communities.
His feature-length A Thousand Months (2002) portrays a small child, Mehdi, who encounters the strangeness of life in a small mountain village to which he has moved with his mother, Amina, to live with his paternal grandfather after his dissident father, unbeknownst to Mehdi, is arrested on political charges. WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006) is a postmodern action film in which style is more significant than a plot that focuses on several characters, the most important of whom are a contract killer, a policewoman, and a young hacker who is attempting to migrate to Europe. Bensaïdi plays the part of the killer, whom we never see speak, with an understated, deadpan humor that references the work of Elia Suleiman. Death for Sale (2011) focuses on the friendship between three young men who live in Tetouan and, having no future prospects, decide to rob a jewelry store. Their friendship is put to the test when one of them falls in love with a beautiful but enigmatic woman who appears out of nowhere, with dire consequences for the robbery. Bensaïdi organizes the narrative into a series of three-shots of the outlaw friends, as if to portend the ultimately climactic unraveling of a doomed unity. Volubilis (2017), named after the ruined Amazigh city near the film’s setting of Meknes, explores the closed and merciless class system in Morocco, as a dull-headed shopping mall security guard, Abdelkader, and his wife, Malika, a maid in an upper-class home, are propelled into a dramatic spiral of violence as they attempt to enforce justice against Malika’s employer (Bensaïdi). Bensaïdi features in his all of these films and frequently appears in those made by others.
BENT FAMILIA (TUNISIENNES) (1997)
The personal lives of three women are exposed and analyzed in this contemporary Tunisian melodrama directed by Nouri Bouzid. Aida is a divorced college professor, proud of her Arab heritage but equally unashamed of her sexuality, who is in love with a Palestinian sequestered in Gaza and is criticized as promiscuous by her adolescent son. Her urban apartment has become a shelter for Fatiha, a refugee from violence in Algeria, and Amina, Aida’s former school friend now married to a wealthy banker who confines her to the home and rapes her out of jealousy. Through careful alternation between interior and exterior scenes, and from the women’s corresponding physical stasis to relative mobility, Bouzid traces each woman’s enlightenment and healing to shifting social and economic conditions in Tunisia. By film’s end, under Aida’s outspoken tutelage, Fatiha decides to return to Algeria despite and because of the challenges it presents, and Amina to divorce her husband, notwithstanding disapproval from her family and social circle.
BERBER FILMS
See AMAZIGH FILMS (BERBER FILMS).
BERLIN IN BERLIN (1993)
Set in the Turkish sector of Berlin, this transnational drama directed by Sinan Çetin depicts the transfer of gender struggles, social customs, and questions of morality across national boundaries in the context of migration from Turkey to Germany. The film centers on an impossible love relationship between a Turkish woman and a German engineer that is subjected to negative pressure from both cultures. Of interest to scholars and critics of exilic and diasporic cinema, Berlin in Berlin also became known in Turkey for a scene in which Hülya Avşar is portrayed masturbating.
BESHARA, KHAIRY (1947–)
This New Realist filmmaker also facilitated the rebirth of documentary cinema in Egypt. Born in Tanta, he graduated from the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema in 1967, after which he studied filmmaking in Poland on fellowship. He directed several documentaries during the mid-1970s through the early 1980s and served as an assistant director on Diary of a Country Prosecutor (Tawfik Saleh, 1969). He then began directing features. The Necklace and the Bracelet (1986) analyzes the social conditions of women’s oppression in a poor rural village in which many men have left to seek work in cities. The film resists the common tendency in Egyptian cinema to stereotype Nubians (black African Berbers, or barbaris). His subsequent Sweet Day, Bitter Day (1988) is a postmelodrama about a poor Cairene widow (Faten Hamama) with three children whose inopportune life choices, determined by social conditions, lead to misfortune and unhappiness. In the 1990s, Beshara shifted generic gears away from realism, making Crabs (1990), an extremely successful musical featuring rising star Ahmed Zaki. It was followed by Ice Cream in Glym (1992), another cross-class musical romance, critically reminiscent of Abdel Halim Hafez vehicles, starring popular teen idol Amr Diab and set in the titular village outside Alexandria. Of Coptic background, Beshara has referred to himself as culturally Islamic. He has taught cinema at the Higher Institute of Cinema and experiments with digital filmmaking. In 2012, he released an experimental docudrama, Moondog, a subjectivized entry into Beshara’s own thought processes and points of view as personified through the perspective of a dog and shot mostly in the United States over a period of 11 years.
BEUR CINEMA
Beur filmmakers comprise a generation of Arab and Amazigh cineastes who are the product of cross-cultural upbringings, with blood ties to their parents’ homelands in North Africa but otherwise rooted in Europe. Technically, beurs are French only—although Belgians are sometimes included; they represent an ethnographic category that emerged following the passage of French immigration and naturalization laws and as a result of colonialism. The term beur is French inversion slang for arabe and refers to the French-born children of North African (Maghrebi) immigrants of Arab as well as Amazigh/Kabyle origin. Also a pun on beurre, the French word for “butter” and phonetically short for “Berber,” it has come to signify the ambivalence associated with bicultural identity. “La génération beur” attained prominence during the late 1970s and 1980s amid increasing racial tensions, the rise of extreme right-wing movements,