Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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and assimilation. Many beur films have been set in the suburbs of Paris and other large French cities, where immigrants from the former colonial possessions are concentrated, hence the term banlieue (French for “suburb”) cinema, which overlaps with and has been used interchangeably with beur cinema.
During the 1970s, the operative term for this grouping of films was cinémas de l’émigration, the usual focus of which was social or political. Included in this period are the early films of the Algerian Ali Akika: Journey to the Capital (1977) and Tears of Blood (1980). In Belgium, Mohamed Ben Salah, born in 1945 in Oran, directed a low-budget feature, Some People and Others (1972), a firsthand account of the problems and pressures of immigrant life. Mohamed Benayat, born in 1944 in Algeria and an Algerian citizen brought to France at the age of four, was active directing films during the 1970s and 1980s. They included The Mask of an Enlightened Woman (1974), Savage Barricades (1975), The New Romantics (1979), Child of the Stars (1985), and Stallion (1988). Abdelkrim Bahloul, born in 1950 in Algeria and also an Algerian citizen, emigrated to France during his teens; he has directed Mint Tea (1984), A Vampire in Paradise (1991), The Hamlet Sisters (1996), The Night of Destiny (1997), and The Assassinated Sun (2004). Other prominent and representative beur filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s include Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, Nadia Fares, Abdellatif Kechiche, Djamila Sahraoui, Saïd Ould-Khelifa, Farouk Beloufa, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche, Bourlem Guerdjou, Malik Chibane, Rachid Bouchareb, Mehdi Charef, Ali Ghalem, Belkacem Hadjadj, Okacha Touita, Mahmoud Zemmouri, Amor Hakkar, and Karim Dridi. Some beur cinema figures have moved back and forth between France and North Africa: an example is Nadir Moknèche (The Harem of Madame Osmane, 1999), who was born in Paris in 1965, grew up in Algeria, but has been living mainly in France since the age of 18.
The term beur, however, remains loosely applied and is increasingly seen to be outmoded—and in some circles offensive—as filmmakers move away from the exploration of migration, racism, and possibilities of integration into French society, commonly producing work that touches only tangentially on the diasporic experience, and thus abandon relatively realist portrayals of banlieue life for genre films, such as comedies, thrillers, and historical costume dramas, supported by the development of stars such as Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, and Gad Elmaleh. In this context, critic Will Higbee has contextualized a post-beur filmmaking practice already apparent by the turn of the 21st century, one that is characteristically transnational in its combining of the local and the global, and that is also a part of French national cinema. French-born Jamel Bensalah’s Boys on the Beach (1999), featuring Debbouze and set outside the banlieue, stimulated demand for further comedies, including Bensalah’s own subsequent hits Beur sur la ville (2011) and Neuilly sa mère, sa mère! (codirected with Gabriel Julien-Lafferière, 2018). By contrast Rachid Bouchareb met considerable critical as well as popular acclaim for his dramatic historical re-creation Days of Glory (2006), featuring Debbouze, Naceri, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila, a period drama depicting the role of North Africans in the defeat of Nazism and the liberation of France during World War II; his Outside the Law (2010), on the other hand, with the same stars, concerns the effect on such Maghrebi immigrants of the Algerian war of liberation from France. In Smuggler’s Songs (2011) and The Story of Judas (2015), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche also turned to period costume films, relying on actors of Maghrebi descent playing roles quite different from those associated with beur cinema; his subsequent film festival favorite South Terminal (2019) presents a dystopian vision of an unnamed society, apparently based on the civil strife in turn-of-the-century Algeria. Abdellatif Kechiche has also made a period film, Black Venus (2010), a biopic based on the life of Saartjie Baartman, but has more recently focused on the exploration of (homo)sexual relationships, notably in Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), a film exemplary of auteurist art cinema.
BEYZAI (BAYZAI), BAHRAM (1938–)
A scholar of theatrical traditions from around the world, Beyzai was a key figure both of the Iranian New Wave and the revitalized auteur cinema that flourished in Iran in the 1990s. He studied theater and film at Tehran University, where he proceeded to teach, and wrote many novels, plays, and puppet plays before first turning to narrative film in the 1970s. His work consistently references theatrical traditions, folklore, and myth; it has also regularly met with censorship both before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is perhaps partly explained by his tendency to foreground strong female characters.
Beyzai’s first feature, Downpour (1972), is a relatively straightforward mystery. The motif of a stranger’s arrival is replayed in The Stranger and the Fog (1975), which shows the influence of the traditional Shi‘i passion play, or taz’ieh. The Crow (1977), now lost, depicts the loss of personal and societal identity and has been read as an allegory for the Pahlavi regime. Two films completed at the time of the Iranian Revolution, The Ballad of Tara (1978) and The Death of Yazdgerd (1980), both mythological and allegorical tales featuring Susan Taslimi, were and remain banned in Iran, apparently for their depiction of unveiled women. In the former, Taslimi plays the keeper of a powerful sword, a similarly totemic figure as Nai’i, who takes in a war-orphaned refugee from the south of Iran in Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986), a key film in establishing Iranian cinema’s reputation for a deep humanism at the end of the 1980s, but which did not receive an exhibition permit in Iran until 1989.
Maybe Some Other Time (1988) is a self-reflexive mystery story, referencing Beyzai’s own The Crow, of a woman (Taslimi in her last Iranian role) searching for her family and identity. These themes recur in The Travellers (1992), which again utilizes distanciation techniques reminiscent of taz’ieh, such as direct address, in the context of a story about a family who die on their way to a wedding but eventually reappear, alive, through the force of the matriarch’s refusal to believe in their deaths. Killing Rabid Dogs (2001) took many years to complete; it is a dark urban thriller, easily interpreted as a critique of the Islamic regime, set in the years immediately following the revolution, which depicts the oppression of intellectuals. When We Are All Asleep (2009) is nominally the story of a woman negotiatng a new relationship after her husband and child have been killed in a car accident; however, the film is highly self-reflexive, with a film crew attempting to shoot the film, multiple actors playing the same role, and different roles and films overlapping so that the “real” is effectively unidentifiable. Since 2010, Beyzai has been mostly resident in the United States, where he has been teaching Persian culture at Stanford University. In October, 2019 Beyzai was one of many luminaries of the Iranian film industry both at home and abroad to sign a statement objecting to increasing obstacles to film production and exhibition in the country.
BLACK HONEY (2010)
Directed by Khaled Marei, this very popular comedy, particularly among young Egyptian adults who have been exposed to North American and European culture, and Third Culture Kids, is a reverse migration narrative, in which the main character, a diasporic Egyptian named Masry Sayed El Arabi (literally, the Egyptian Arab Master) returns to the homeland at the age of 30 and is compelled to adjust to a place where the kindness of strangers has been replaced with opportunism and deceit, but where redemption occurs as the protagonist manages to find his parents’ apartment and is taken in by his childhood friend and the latter’s family. The film offers a light critique of Egyptian culture and society before resolving to reinforce nationalistic stereotypes and sentiments in the course of making frequent intertextual references to recognizable cultural figures and occasions (alash). Its central conflict revolves around Masry’s refusal to use his U.S. passport and, in that context, his desire not to be treated as a foreigner (khawaga). Upon arrival in Cairo, he is extorted by an airport taxi driver, and he is subsequently granted several