remains privileged, however, and Beyzai incorporates elements from Eastern theatrical tradition to tell a broadly humanist antiwar story in which Bashu’s dead mother haunts his new world and facilitates Nai’i’s adoption of him. Although these war references have generally been blamed for Bashu’s having remained unscreened in Iran for three years and finally shown only in 1989, after the end of the war with Iraq, its strong, somewhat confrontational portrayal of Nai’i and its implicit renegotiation of Iranian identity may have equally troubled the censors.
BAT-ADAM, MICHAL (1945–)
One of the Israeli film industry’s only female directors, Michal Bat-Adam is also a trained actor who has performed in films of the Young Israeli Cinema, including The House on Chelouche Street (1973) and Daughters, Daughters (1973), both directed by her husband, Moshe Mizrahi; Atalia (Akiva Tevet, 1984); and Moments de la vie d’une femme (1979), The Lover (1985), and The Deserter’s Wife (1992), which she also directed. Bat-Adam’s star intertext promotes diplomatic confrontation of the social and cultural contradictions marring Ashkenazi–Mizrahi relations in Israel, implying through the self-consciously ambiguous performance of stereotypical feminine behavior that such contradictions can be overcome aesthetically. Her 2016 feature, The Road to Where, carries this discourse into the question of Israeli‒Palestinian relations. See also WOMEN.
BATTLE OF ALGIERS, THE (1966)
Directed by Italian socialist and activist Gillo Pontecorvo (1919–2006) and coproduced by the only independent production company in postindependence Algeria, Casbah Films, headed by Yacef Saadi, the onetime Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) military commander in Algiers, who plays himself in the film, The Battle of Algiers is one of history’s most powerful cinematic studies of colonial occupation and its resistance. Pontecorvo’s documentary-style reenactment of a key series of episodes in Algeria’s struggle for independence from France re-creates the Algerian uprising against the occupying French during the Battle of Algiers of 1954–1957. The film opens in 1957, as Colonel Mathieu, a cold-blooded representative of the French military, has just forced a confession revealing the location of Ali La Pointe, an FLN member and a symbol of Algerian resistance and identity. Paratroopers locate La Pointe and other resistance fighters, including a young woman and 13-year-old boy, hiding inside the Casbah. Their ultimatum: surrender or be blown up. As La Pointe and his comrades consider their options, the film flashes back to 1954, when the FLN launched major military operations in Algiers, and re-creates key stages in the uprising and in La Pointe’s political development. Meanwhile, Mathieu places the Casbah under martial law, with military checkpoints, raids, and mass arrests. The FLN reacts with assassinations, and Mathieu unleashes a program of systematic torture and other forms of collective punishment.
By 1957, the rebellion weakens in the face of intensifying French military efforts and the capture of FLN leaders. However, the film ends with the outbreak of mass demonstrations and a renewed Algerian uprising that eventually forced France to cede power to the FLN. Pontecorvo’s development of a quasi-documentary form of realism, with newsreel-style narration and captions, 16-mm handheld news cameras, and the use of FLN and official French military proclamations, were groundbreaking. An accomplished composer and musician, Pontecorvo provided his film with a complex soundtrack, highlighted by Ennio Morricone’s alternately overwhelming and restrained score. While The Battle of Algiers was immediately successful in Algeria, Italy, and the United States, it was banned in France and Great Britain until 1971. It was also one of a few anticolonial films to be banned under the shah in Iran, but it was exhibited after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It has remained pertinent in more recent times and was supposedly screened for American military leaders at the Pentagon in the early stages of the Iraq War.
BAYOUMI, MOHAMED (1894–1963)
Born in Tata, Egypt, Bayoumi graduated from military school in Cairo in 1915 and served in Sudan and Palestine. Eager to be involved with the cinema, he moved briefly to Berlin in the early 1920s, where he studied film and worked as a minor actor in the German film industry, then in one of its most creative periods. Returning to Egypt, Bayoumi was cinematographer on Italian Victor Rosito’s In the Land of Tutankhamen (1923), and he directed a short film version of a play, The Clerk (1923). He founded Amon Films in Cairo, where he oversaw the production of a series of newsreels and patriotic, anti-British shorts, as well as some short narratives, such as Barsum Looking for a Job (1923). In 1924, Bayoumi filmed the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. He apparently completed a narrative feature, The Victim, as cinematographer and director in 1928, but it was not released, meaning that his only directorial feature was Fiancé Number 13 (1933), shortly after which he abandoned film production. Bayoumi founded a cinematographic training institute, Egypt’s first, in Alexandria in 1932.
BEHI, RIDHA (1947–)
Born in the Muslim holy city of Kairouan in Tunisia, Behi studied sociology and ethnography at Nanterre, then began his filmmaking career with Hyenas’ Sun (1977), a scathing indictment of Western transnationalism in which the economic and political structure of an entire seaside Berber village is irrevocably transformed when a European tourist resort is built nearby. Behi’s subsequent The Angels (1984), however, was a melodrama in the Egyptian style, as was his Bitter Champagne (1988), starring Julie Christie and Ben Gazzara, concerning a young man who unwittingly has an affair with his father’s mistress. Despite their generic styles and Western stars, these films were subject to censorship for their perceived political undertones.
Behi again selected an international cast for Swallows Never Die in Jerusalem (1994), a melodramatic homage to the Palestinian struggle set on the eve of the Oslo Accords. Richard, a French television journalist, travels to Israel to cover the historic negotiations. There he meets a Palestinian taxi driver, Hammoudi/“Local Radio” (Curfew’s Salim Dau), who he learns has been searching for his long-lost grandmother, and he decides to arrange a television interview between his own Jewish girlfriend Esther’s father, Moshe (Ben Gazzara), a Holocaust survivor, and Hammoudi’s father, a Gazan refugee. Hammoudi’s brother, Riadh, however, formerly an exile in Jordan, has joined an Islamist organization that violently protests the Oslo Accords, thus undermining Richard’s mediating efforts. His idealism is strikingly figured in a noteworthy panning shot of Jerusalem that enframes the major holy sites of all three religions represented by the film’s characters, which prefigures a similar shot in a later Palestinian film, Looking Awry / Hawal (Sobhi al-Zobaidi, 2005). Swallows has been criticized for its displacement of excessive blame on Palestinian militants, especially those adherent to Islam, for the failures of Oslo.
Behi’s provocative, humanist critiques of conflict and political idealism continued with The Magic Box (2002), which examines the complex life of Raouf, a resident of Tunis whose French wife, burdened with ennui, has become an alcoholic. To escape ensuing domestic problems, he decides to write a screenplay about his childhood in Kairouan. The screenplay recounts his early relationship with his uncle, a traveling film projectionist who owns a cinema caravan and whom Raouf accompanies throughout the rural countryside as respite from the harsh treatment he receives from his strict, religious father. Recalling Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1990), with which the film has been compared, Raouf’s uncle introduces him to the wonders of cinema, a gift that comes full circle in the present context of the screenplay. Always Brando (2011), a project originally intended to feature the iconic American actor, both celebrates his skills and recounts the often corrupt nature of the movie business. The Flower of Aleppo (2016), starring Hend Sabri, tells the story of a
