Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg

Socatra Island, the Saudi response to 9/11, the Hadj pilgrimage, and Yemen and the “war on terror.” Shifting into narrative filmmaking, they made several short dramas before embarking on A New Day in Old Sana’a.

      BEN MAHMOUD, MAHMOUD (1947–)

      Born in Tunis, beur filmmaker Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud studied cinema at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion, then history of art, archaeology, and journalism in Belgium, where he has taught since 1988 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In addition to directing numerous documentaries, Ben Mahmoud’s first feature was the autobiographical Crossing Over (aka Crossings) (1981), the story of two travelers crossing the English Channel in a ferry, one an Arab intellectual (Youssef), the other a working-class Eastern European (Bogdan). When they try to disembark at Dover, Bogdan is refused entry because he has no money, and Youssef is refused because his visa has expired. Their treatment by British customs officers is violent and dismissive; Bogdan is subject to a strip search. The ferry returns with them to Belgium, where they receive similar treatment from customs officers there; this time, however, Bogdan is beaten not only by police but by a local white supremacist gang when he and Youssef try to escape. Forced to remain on board the ferry in seeming perpetuity, Bogdan takes a job washing dishes, but, dejected by Youssef’s accusation that he has evaded his political responsibilities by refusing to fight back against his ill treatment, he murders a guard. Youssef, on the other hand, decides to write about their experience, which metaphorizes exile and alienation in a transnational world. With Fadhel Jaïbi, Ben Mahmoud subsequently codirected Diamond Dust (1992), which through emphasis on memory and genealogy explores the incapacity of minorities to communicate within the dominant culture. A further solo feature, The Pomegranate Siesta, was released in 1999.

      The Professor (2013) considers the reconfiguration of the political landscape in the 1970s after Habib Bourguiba imposed his lifetime presidency in Tunisia. The protagonist is a member of the League of Human Rights created in 1976. He participates in political meetings while having an affair with a student, both of which will lead to his downfall and deportation to a remote rural area. Ben Mahmoud’s next film was the award-winning Fatwa (2019), in which a father (Ahmed Hafiane) returns to Tunisia from France, where he lives, in order to bury his son, who is said to have died in a motorcycle accident. During this trip, the father meets his estranged wife (Ghalia Benali), who is under a fatwa (legal injunction) for having written a book denouncing Salafism. As the two argue about the rituals they want for the burial, the father discovers that his son had joined a militant Islamist group. Fatwa depicts the unraveling of intimate family relationships while relying on the suspense of the thriller genre, suggesting that Ben Mahmoud is reaching out to a larger, more diverse public.

      BENANI (BENNANI), HAMID (1940[1942?]–)

      A film school graduate from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris, Moroccan-born Benani made short films for Moroccan television and wrote for the review Cinema 3, Morocco’s only cinema studies publication. Benani’s debut film, Traces (1970), treats the social and psychological problems of a young boy, adopted by an authoritarian father, who yearns for liberty and autonomy. The film was hailed by critics and historians as an “auteur” vehicle rich in signs and visual symbols, yet its semiological density made it unpopular with mainstream filmgoers. Twenty-five years later, Benani’s second feature, an adaptation of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel A Prayer for the Absent (1995), is an equally semiotically rich exploration of a young man’s search for self-identity and religious reconciliation, while L’enfant cheikh (2011) is an ode to Amazigh resistance in the Rif War.

      BENGUIGUI, YAMINA (1957–)

      Born in France to Algerian parents, Benguigui is the director of penetrating films on women’s issues related to the North African immigrant, or beur, community in France, including the documentaries Women of Islam (1994), Immigrant Memories: The North African Inheritance (1997) (based on her book of the same name), and The Perfumed Garden (2000), as well as many other documentaries and shorts, some made for television. Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001), her first fictional feature (based on her novel of the same name), tells the story of Zouina, who arrives in France from rural Algeria following the 1974 family reunion law that allows Algerian women to join husbands working in France. Zouina’s husband, Ahmed, is overprotective of Zouina and grants her only limited liberties. She struggles with his physical abuse and her mother-in-law’s verbal harassment and is helped by French friends to extricate herself from the situation through acclimation to French life and culture. As a result, Zouina becomes more confident, by film’s end achieving a modicum of self-determination beyond the domestic sphere. Benguigui has continued to make documentaries, including a controversial account of the deprived Seine Saint-Denis department in northeastern Paris, 9/3 Memory of a Territory (2008). Elected to the Paris City Council in 2008 and briefly serving as a junior minister for French nationals abroad in 2012, Benguigui has become increasingly involved in politics and worked for Martine Aubry’s campaign in the 2012 French elections.

      BENHADJ, MOHAMED RACHID (1949–)

      Algerian Benhadj grew up in Algiers, studied cinema at Université de Paris, made documentaries for Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne, then directed his first feature, Desert Rose, in 1989. The film recounts, through his own eyes, the life of a young, severely handicapped boy, Moussa, who struggles to overcome his infirmities in a remote desert village. The film’s rich detail is expressed in images and sound rather than words. After directing Touchia (1993), concerning social struggle in Algeria, Benhadj continued his examination of childhood struggle in Mirka (1999), which follows an abandoned infant in the Balkans as he searches for his roots and lost mother. It stands as an indictment of rape as a tool of war. By this time, Benhadj had moved to Italy; however, in 2005, he adapted For Bread Alone from the book by Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri, about the political coming to consciousness of young Mohamed, a street urchin from a severely impoverished Tangiers family. Leaving home to avoid starvation and paternal abuse, Mohamed becomes involved in drugs, alcohol, thievery, and prostitution and is eventually arrested and imprisoned at 20. In prison, he meets a nationalist leader, learns to read and write, and, upon his release, becomes a primary school teacher working to educate children on how to escape from poverty and ignorance. Benhadj, who studied architecture, is also an accomplished painter.

      This concern for the marginalized, impoverished, and related social problems continues with Perfumes of Algiers (2012), a film about Karima, a female photographer at the height of her career in Europe who must go back to Algiers to visit her dying father, whom she ran from 20 years earlier. Once in Algiers, she attempts to get her brother, who has been sentenced for terrorism offenses, released from prison. The Star of Algiers (2016), adapted from Aziz Chouaki’s novel of the same name, raises the question of personal fulfillment. It is about a young singer and musician whose career takes off at the same time as his dream is threatened by Islamists. Matarès (2019) concerns two children who sell flowers in the market and the Roman ruins of the titular Algerian city. One, Mona, a migrant from the Ivory Coast, seeks to collect the money she needs to reach Italy in order to be reunited with her father but must overcome the antipathy of the other, local boy Said, who resents her intrusion on his territory.

      BENJELLOUN, HASSAN (1950–)

      Previously a pharmacist, Benjelloun trained in Paris at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français and has gone on to become one of Morocco’s most prolific directors. His Judgment of a Woman (2000) raises the questions of women’s rights and divorce, while his comedy The Pal (2002), enormously popular at the box office, depicts poor Moroccans struggling against the rich for their legal rights. The Black Room (2004), inspired by the book by Jaouad Mdidech, depicts the Years of Lead in Morocco under King Hassan II, when Marxists, students, and union leaders were imprisoned and tortured. Where Are You Going, Moshe? (2007) treats the historical period during