quo, although commentators continue to dispute whether other key films of the period, such as Qeysar (Massud Kimiai, 1969), are more usefully considered new wave or simply as developments of standard industry genres. In any case, a much bigger change followed the revolution: many earlier films, both domestic and foreign, were banned from theaters, while much more severe restrictions on the depiction of women comprised one of the most notable constraints on new productions. Despite these developments, the Islamic authorities, personified by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were not opposed to cinema per se, and, following the establishment of the Farabi Cinema Foundation, which facilitated various aspects of their work, Iranian directors, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, developed a strong art sector by the 1990s that helped foster a substantial presence for Iranian cinema in international film festivals and resulted in a transnational art cinema largely distinct from, though inevitably drawing upon, the country’s continuing popular cinematic traditions. As in Turkey and Egypt, and increasingly in Morocco and Tunisia, domestic comedies are today the predominant box-office hits in Iran.
Unlike the above cinemas, those of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Israel have been relatively less prolific, with the Lebanese example being the most productive through a genre- and star-driven industry bolstered with logistical support over the years from Egypt; however, its fate has been bound up with the destructiveness of civil wars and external pressures. The influence of Egyptian cinema led to early Lebanese films of the 1930s being produced in the Egyptian rather than Levantine vernacular. Lebanese commercial cinema carried an orientalist tenor conducive to popular formula films during the country’s “golden age” of the 1950s, although some Lebanese films resisted the postcolonialist Egyptian model. In many instances, such films, which served to fortify the country’s national cinema, were made by Christian filmmakers, in contrast to the works of their Muslim compatriots, which tended to identify more with Nasserist pan-Arabism and, therefore, the Egyptian system. On the other hand, Lebanon occasionally welcomed Egyptian filmmakers, disenchanted with Nasser, who lent talent and prestige to the Lebanese industry. The Lebanese Civil War, however, made consistent film production nearly impossible, and a much more artisanal practice, often with an explicitly avant-garde orientation, was characteristic of Lebanese cinema in the years leading up to and immediately following the turn of the 21st century. Such an experimental emphasis remains an important part of the Lebanese cinemascape, although more festival-oriented, transnational productions such as Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2019) are beginning to appear.
The Israeli film industry has also been limited by the exigencies of war and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands, the high cost of which has historically precluded sustained funding for quality filmmaking. Hence, the Israeli cinema has always sought funding abroad. The earliest Israeli films made about historical Palestine were actualité films and short pastoral dramas produced by the European-based Jewish National Fund or Palestine Foundation Fund/United Israel Appeal and were themselves intended as fundraising vehicles for the nascent Zionist cause. After Israel was established in 1948, two national production facilities opened that produced less nostalgic, more forward-looking films for domestic Jewish audiences. Since 1954, a series of state funding agencies has supplied these facilities with financial assistance that has enabled a relatively small but consistent output of popular-commercial melodramas, war films, and comedies, of which the bourekas genre, centered on stereotyped Mizrahi Jews, is perhaps the most noteworthy. Persistent war and violence through the 1960s prompted a series of generic transformations contextualizing the Six-Day and Yom Kippur–Ramadan Wars, known generally as the Young Israeli Cinema. This period also witnessed the emergence of the country’s foremost auteur, Amos Gitai, and the producer-director Menachem Golan, whose Cannon Films was one of the earliest players in contemporary transnational cinematic production. In the wake of the First Intifada, popular demand for films that would address sociopolitical concerns more directly and explicitly led to the production of numerous independent documentaries about the Palestinian–Israeli struggle, the OPTs, and related matters, as well as some concerned with Palestinian–Israeli society outside the matter of the struggle. Perhaps in response, the Israeli Censorship Board was dismantled in 1991, and film censorship came under the control of the Interior Ministry. Since then, Israeli industry–art hybrids, mostly psychological melodramas funded through international appeal, have been released on the world cinema circuit. While presenting the damage caused to the Israeli psyche by the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict, they have often attempted to put a gentler face on the continuing occupation of Palestine. Between 2002 and 2010, this attempt became codified as hasbara, a highly visible, state-sponsored public diplomacy campaign, largely funded internationally, that has found occasional cinematic coproducers in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, India, and sometimes among Palestinians, as well as in Europe and the United States. Perhaps the most controversial of these collaborators is Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri.
Just as Israeli national cinema arose, Palestinian cinema was prevented from doing so, as part of the general restrictions placed on the Palestinian population. Indeed, not until the mid-1980s would Palestinian cinema develop domestically, after a lengthy period of flourishing in exile. The complex relationship of Palestinian cinema with Israel and with sources of funding outside the region that contributed to the political art cinema of such figures as Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, and more recently Hany Abu-Assad, Rashid Masharawi, and Annemarie Jacir is discussed in the next section.
State restrictions—of another stripe—have also been instrumental in constraining Iraqi and Syrian filmmaking, both historically limited, as in Algeria, to state-run monopolies. Production in Ba‘thist Syria’s National Film Organization (NFO) never resulted in more than a few films per year, and the situation was little better in postindependence Iraq, either during its period of private production or during its nationalization under the Ba‘th government into the General Organization for Cinema and Theatre (GOCT). Moreover, the Iran–Iraq War and subsequent 1991 Gulf War as well as the 2003 Anglo-American invasion and occupation all but ended film production in the country. Syrian cinema, however, continued to produce a slow, uneven stream of quality films, often directed by former students of the prestigious Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow and meant ideally for domestic audiences yet frequently restricted, censorially, to international distribution due to their varied critiques, many quite allegorical, of the regime. Perhaps the most widely viewed film of this sort is Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid’s Nights of the Jackal (1989). This limited cinematic production was severely curtailed by the civil and military crisis that erupted during the 2010s, whereupon the remaining, major established Syrian directors, all quite elderly, left the country—although Oussama Mohammad, at least, has contributed a coauthored film, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), using footage shot by a collaborator still in the country. The traditionally more substantial production of televisual material in Syria has been somewhat better sustained. Because of their ostensible support for pan-Arabism, both the Syrian NFO and the Iraqi GOCT welcomed guest directors from Egypt and other Arab countries in order to lend much-needed caché to their faltering industries and to encourage international diplomacy.
Recently, cinema has emerged in Jordan, although government incentives and encouragement during the 2000s subsequently declined during the 2010s, while the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia have also started production, and still more recently have begun to institute initiatives for previously absent—or in the case of the UAE, where several high-profile international film festivals have seen their international financial backing rather suddenly withdrawn, foreclosed—opportunities for domestic exhibition. The first stirrings of cinema in Yemen, evident in the early 21st century, have not significantly materialized due to the civil and military crisis that has now engulfed and impoverished the country. The recent revival of interest in cinema in Sudan, a country from which it has been relatively absent, however, may suggest a future for the medium there, especially since the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Each of these countries is now the subject of an entry in the second edition of this historical dictionary.
Cinema and Nation in the Middle East
To a substantial degree, cinema has served to define the character of the peoples and nations
