de feu (Of Sand and Fire), a historical drama.
BEN HANIA, KAOUTHER (1977–)
Born in Sidi Bouzid, Ben Hania is a prolific Tunisian screenwriter and filmmaker who works in both fictional and documentary modes. A former member of the Fédération Tunisienne des Cinéastes Amateurs, a politically engaged federation of amateur filmmakers in Tunisia, she trained at Femis in France. Her short films include Me, My Sister and “the Thing” (2006) and Wooden Hand (2013), the latter about a little girl, Amira, who does not wish to attend Kouttab (Qur’anic preschool). Ben Hania develops narratives based on news items and uses them to explore the porosity between social reality and fiction as well as to expose relationships of power created, at least in part, by the act of filming. Her first feature-length film, The Blade of Tunis (2013), recounts the mysterious story of a man accused of slashing women’s buttocks while riding on his moped. Shot in documentary style, this fictional work follows a filmmaker (played by Ben Hania) as she attempts, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, to uncover the truth about this man but ends up leading the viewer instead through a mélange of improbable interviews that enable an exploration of the construction of the slashings into a national news event. Zeineb Hates the Snow (2016) is a documentary shot over several years that captures the intimate lives of a widowed mother and her daughter as they move from Tunisia to Canada to start a new life. The film won the Tanit d’or at the Carthage Film Festival in 2016. Beauty and the Dogs (2017) is based on the true story of a woman who is raped by two policemen and in turn transforms from a shamefaced victim into a fighter for justice and women’s rights under repressive social conditions. The film, which has attracted large audiences both in Tunisia and abroad, comprises a series of extremely long sequence shots that frame the progressive shift in power between the police and the protagonist, Mariam, through the course of their film-length confrontation. See also ISLAM (ISLAMIST).
BEN HIRSI, BADER (1968–)
Born in London, as the youngest of 14 children to Yemeni exile parents, Bader Ben Hirsi is the director of Yemen’s first feature, A New Day in Old Sana’a (2005). Trained in business and theater, Ben Hirsi began to make films in collaboration with his childhood friend, also of Yemeni descent, Ahmed Al Abdali, who has composed music for and produced their projects. After visiting Yemen for the first time in 1995 at the age of 27, Ben Hirsi directed a documentary, The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman (2000), chronicling his return visit to his ancestral homeland under the guidance of English expatriate travel writer Tim Macintosh-Smith. Ben Hirsi and Al Abdali have also created other documentaries on Yemen’s contested 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
