transfer of gender struggles, social customs, and questions of morality across national boundaries in the context of migration from Turkey to Germany. The film centers on an impossible love relationship between a Turkish woman and a German engineer that is subjected to negative pressure from both cultures. Of interest to scholars and critics of exilic and diasporic cinema, Berlin in Berlin also became known in Turkey for a scene in which Hülya Avşar is portrayed masturbating.
BESHARA, KHAIRY (1947–)
This New Realist filmmaker also facilitated the rebirth of documentary cinema in Egypt. Born in Tanta, he graduated from the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema in 1967, after which he studied filmmaking in Poland on fellowship. He directed several documentaries during the mid-1970s through the early 1980s and served as an assistant director on Diary of a Country Prosecutor (Tawfik Saleh, 1969). He then began directing features. The Necklace and the Bracelet (1986) analyzes the social conditions of women’s oppression in a poor rural village in which many men have left to seek work in cities. The film resists the common tendency in Egyptian cinema to stereotype Nubians (black African Berbers, or barbaris). His subsequent Sweet Day, Bitter Day (1988) is a postmelodrama about a poor Cairene widow (Faten Hamama) with three children whose inopportune life choices, determined by social conditions, lead to misfortune and unhappiness. In the 1990s, Beshara shifted generic gears away from realism, making Crabs (1990), an extremely successful musical featuring rising star Ahmed Zaki. It was followed by Ice Cream in Glym (1992), another cross-class musical romance, critically reminiscent of Abdel Halim Hafez vehicles, starring popular teen idol Amr Diab and set in the titular village outside Alexandria. Of Coptic background, Beshara has referred to himself as culturally Islamic. He has taught cinema at the Higher Institute of Cinema and experiments with digital filmmaking. In 2012, he released an experimental docudrama, Moondog, a subjectivized entry into Beshara’s own thought processes and points of view as personified through the perspective of a dog and shot mostly in the United States over a period of 11 years.
BEUR CINEMA
Beur filmmakers comprise a generation of Arab and Amazigh cineastes who are the product of cross-cultural upbringings, with blood ties to their parents’ homelands in North Africa but otherwise rooted in Europe. Technically, beurs are French only—although Belgians are sometimes included; they represent an ethnographic category that emerged following the passage of French immigration and naturalization laws and as a result of colonialism. The term beur is French inversion slang for arabe and refers to the French-born children of North African (Maghrebi) immigrants of Arab as well as Amazigh/Kabyle origin. Also a pun on beurre, the French word for “butter” and phonetically short for “Berber,” it has come to signify the ambivalence associated with bicultural identity. “La génération beur” attained prominence during the late 1970s and 1980s amid increasing racial tensions, the rise of extreme right-wing movements, and national debates across Europe about immigration, integration, and assimilation. Many beur films have been set in the suburbs of Paris and other large French cities, where immigrants from the former colonial possessions are concentrated, hence the term banlieue (French for “suburb”) cinema, which overlaps with and has been used interchangeably with beur cinema.
During the 1970s, the operative term for this grouping of films was cinémas de l’émigration, the usual focus of which was social or political. Included in this period are the early films of the Algerian Ali Akika: Journey to the Capital (1977) and Tears of Blood (1980). In Belgium, Mohamed Ben Salah, born in 1945 in Oran, directed a low-budget feature, Some People and Others (1972), a firsthand account of the problems and pressures of immigrant life. Mohamed Benayat, born in 1944 in Algeria and an Algerian citizen brought to France at the age of four, was active directing films during the 1970s and 1980s. They included The Mask of an Enlightened Woman (1974), Savage Barricades (1975), The New Romantics (1979), Child of the Stars (1985), and Stallion (1988). Abdelkrim Bahloul, born in 1950 in Algeria and also an Algerian citizen, emigrated to France during his teens; he has directed Mint Tea (1984), A Vampire in Paradise (1991), The Hamlet Sisters (1996), The Night of Destiny (1997), and The Assassinated Sun (2004). Other prominent and representative beur filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s include Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, Nadia Fares, Abdellatif Kechiche, Djamila Sahraoui, Saïd Ould-Khelifa, Farouk Beloufa, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche, Bourlem Guerdjou, Malik Chibane, Rachid Bouchareb, Mehdi Charef, Ali Ghalem, Belkacem Hadjadj, Okacha Touita, Mahmoud Zemmouri, Amor Hakkar, and Karim Dridi. Some beur cinema figures have moved back and forth between France and North Africa: an example is Nadir Moknèche (The Harem of Madame Osmane, 1999), who was born in Paris in 1965, grew up in Algeria, but has been living mainly in France since the age of 18.
The term beur, however, remains loosely applied and is increasingly seen to be outmoded—and in some circles offensive—as filmmakers move away from the exploration of migration, racism, and possibilities of integration into French society, commonly producing work that touches only tangentially on the diasporic experience, and thus abandon relatively realist portrayals of banlieue life for genre films, such as comedies, thrillers, and historical costume dramas, supported by the development of stars such as Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, and Gad Elmaleh. In this context, critic Will Higbee has contextualized a post-beur filmmaking practice already apparent by the turn of the 21st century, one that is characteristically transnational in its combining of the local and the global, and that is also a part of French national cinema. French-born Jamel Bensalah’s Boys on the Beach (1999), featuring Debbouze and set outside the banlieue, stimulated demand for further comedies, including Bensalah’s own subsequent hits Beur sur la ville (2011) and Neuilly sa mère, sa mère! (codirected with Gabriel Julien-Lafferière, 2018). By contrast Rachid Bouchareb met considerable critical as well as popular acclaim for his dramatic historical re-creation Days of Glory (2006), featuring Debbouze, Naceri, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila, a period drama depicting the role of North Africans in the defeat of Nazism and the liberation of France during World War II; his Outside the Law (2010), on the other hand, with the same stars, concerns the effect on such Maghrebi immigrants of the Algerian war of liberation from France. In Smuggler’s Songs (2011) and The Story of Judas (2015), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche also turned to period costume films, relying on actors of Maghrebi descent playing roles quite different from those associated with beur cinema; his subsequent film festival favorite South Terminal (2019) presents a dystopian vision of an unnamed society, apparently based on the civil strife in turn-of-the-century Algeria. Abdellatif Kechiche has also made a period film, Black Venus (2010), a biopic based on the life of Saartjie Baartman, but has more recently focused on the exploration of (homo)sexual relationships, notably in Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), a film exemplary of auteurist art cinema.
BEYZAI (BAYZAI), BAHRAM (1938–)
A scholar of theatrical traditions from around the world, Beyzai was a key figure both of the Iranian New Wave and the revitalized auteur cinema that flourished in Iran in the 1990s. He studied theater and film at Tehran University, where he proceeded to teach, and wrote many novels, plays, and puppet plays before first turning to narrative film in the 1970s. His work consistently references theatrical traditions, folklore, and myth; it has also regularly met with censorship both before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is perhaps partly explained by his tendency to foreground strong female characters.
