That practice is critiqued in Waiting (Rashid Masharawi, 2005), which foregrounds the function of belly dancing as a tourist attraction for exilic Palestinians, and Whatever Lola Wants (Nabil Ayouch, 2006), which supplies a transnational angle on tourism.
BELOUFA, FAROUK (1947–2018)
Beloufa, who was a French-resident Algerian filmmaker, attended the Institut National du Cinéma d’Alger in 1964 and studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in 1966, before directing a documentary, The War of Liberation (1973). He was an assistant to Youssef Chahine on the Algerian–Egyptian coproduction The Return of the Prodigal Son (1976), then directed his first and only feature, Nahla (1979), set during the 1975 war in Lebanon. Nahla chronicles the relationships of a young Algerian journalist, who works at a pro-Palestinian newspaper, with three women—a faltering singer (the titular Nahla), a journalist, and an activist—who share their stories with him across a series of elliptical scenes. The film’s narrative-compositional structure and a musical score by Fairuz’s son, Ziad Rahbani, reflect the confusions and renewed perspectives brought about during the Lebanese Civil War. Hailed by critics, the film was subject to a failed censorship attempt by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina and played widely, if not always to popular acclaim, throughout Algeria.
BEN AMAR (BEN AMMAR), ABDELLATIF (1943–)
Born in Tunis, Ben Amar graduated in 1964 from the Institut des hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris. He directed three significant features during the 1970s: Such a Simple Story (1970), Sejnane (1974), and Aziza (1979/80), all of which were granted awards at the Carthage Film Festival. Such a Simple Story examines the contradictions of social integration in Tunisia through a film-within-a-film plot structure. Chamseddine, a young filmmaker, is documenting Tunisian migrant workers returning from Europe, in particular Hamed, who recounts the difficulty he faces reinserting himself into rural life with a foreign wife whose Western views are not accepted. Chamseddine’s fiancée from France also has difficulties adapting and is not accepted by his family. Sejnane is a key anticolonial film offering a portrait of the events surrounding Tunisian independence. Set in 1952 Tunis, it tells the story of Kemal, who works in a printing company and whose father is assassinated by a secret colonial organization. Kemal’s love interest, the daughter of the company’s owner, is to be married by arrangement to another man, leading Kemal to begin asking questions about Tunisia’s political situation and to become involved with union activists. He is killed when they are all shot down—as his love is being married off. Aziza shifts the focus of change and integration to the story of a young woman who must adapt when her rural family moves into modern housing in a working-class urban suburb. Among other things, the move disrupts traditional gender roles; as the men in her family deal with diminished patriarchal authority, Aziza finds work in a local textile factory and achieves financial independence.
For the next 20 years, Ben Amar specialized in documentaries and commercials, and, through his production company, Latif Productions, produced Wanderers in the Desert (aka The Drifters) (Nacer Khemir, 1984). Then, in 2002, he directed The Song of the Noria (aka Melody of the Waterwheel), perhaps the first Tunisian example of the road movie genre. Zeineb, in her thirties, is finally granted a legal divorce but flees in fear of her jealous husband on the advice of her attorney. She meets an old flame, Mohamed, an archaeologist whose father, it is gradually revealed, has committed suicide following the expropriation of his land. Mohamed is trying to locate a film crew, one of whose members owes him money, and to save enough to study in France. He and Zeinab travel together across the desert in search of the film crew that might provide their desired escape, but never locate it, instead becoming entangled with a con man and a group of thugs sent by Zeinab’s husband. His later Wounded Palm Trees (2010) is an Algerian‒Tunisian production about a young woman’s quest to understand the violence in Bizerte in 1961 that led to her father’s death. This little-known conflict occurred on the margins of the Algerian war of liberation and pitted the French army, which had retained control over two military bases in this remote area of Tunisia, against Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba’s desire to remove them; the ensuing violence caused the deaths of hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000, Tunisians.
BEN ATTIA, MOHAMED (1976–)
Ben Attia is a Tunisian filmmaker and screenwriter who earned a business degree in Tunis and then a degree in communication in France before making a range of short films, among them Kif Lochrin (2006), which was awarded the Silver Stallion at FESPACO in 2006, and Selma (2013), which won numerous awards.
Ben Attia’s films are generic works that explore moments of rupture in the personal lives of his characters as they struggle for meaning within stifling environments. His first feature-length film, Hedi (2016), focuses on a soon-to-be-married traveling salesman whose passion is drawing comic strips. Hedi feels trapped by his overbearing mother until he meets Rym, an entertainer in a large hotel. The ensuing passionate love affair compels him to come to terms with his incapacity to make his own decisions. Dear Son (2018) examines Islamic radicalization from an atypical perspective. A working-class couple, Riadh and Nazli, living in a suburb of Tunis worries about their son Sami’s migraines as he prepares to graduate from secondary school. Sami’s sudden disappearance marks the beginning of a long journey for his parents, at the end of which they must come to terms with his decision to join ISIS in Syria. The impact of Dear Son derives from its focus on parental distress rather than child psychology. The spectator, like Riadh and Nazli, must grapple, self-reflexively, with the possible motivations behind Sami’s choice. Both Dear Son and Hedi were coproduced with the ostensibly left-leaning Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne brothers.
BEN BARKA, SOUHEIL (1942–)
Ben Barka is known for his mix of realism in historical epics, as well as for championing African issues of social justice in films that at once exemplify and stand to critique salient aspects of African transnational cinema. His work ranges from films critiquing modern social malaise to blockbuster historical epics interrogating the power struggles in Pharaonic Egypt and Andalusian Spain– Morocco–Turkey, and against colonialism in Morocco. Born in Timbuktu, Mali, Ben Barka earned a degree in sociology from Rome University after graduating in filmmaking from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He worked for five years in Italy as assistant to, among others, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Upon coming to Morocco, he established Euro-Maghreb Films and later built a series of cinema complexes, Le Dawliz, in several Moroccan cities.
As a filmmaker and producer, he made a number of documentary shorts and features before becoming director of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain from 1986 to 2003. Ben Barka’s first feature, 1001 Hands (1972), made partly with European funding, attacked the impact of tourism on the Moroccan underclass and the discrepancy between Morocco’s powerful merchants and workers exploited for their labor. Another feature, The Oil War Will Not Happen (1974), concerning exploited oil workers in an anonymous African country, was banned in Morocco just after it received its exhibition permit, even though the government had facilitated certain sequences, allowing filming at a state-run petroleum complex and giving permission for the army to appear in a struggle against oil workers. According to Ben Barka, the film was banned because it criticized Saudi Arabia. Amok (1982)—an antiapartheid drama funded by Senegal, Guinea, and Morocco and adapted from Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)—was the first film concerning South African apartheid shot entirely in sub-Saharan Africa. Ben Barka has continued to make films, sometimes for television,
