war film in the tradition of the Hollywood genre that exposes the exploitation of North African soldiers who either volunteered for or were conscripted into the Gaullist forces during World War II. With the exception of the less widely distributed Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene, 1987), the role of Africans in this primarily European war had been ignored, if not largely forgotten, prior to Bouchareb’s cinematic intervention. In 2010, Bouchareb directed Outside the Law (2010), with the same stars: Djamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila. In this genre film, which he claims was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969), Bouchareb revisits the history of the Algerian war of liberation in France. The film focuses on three Algerian brothers whose lives diverged before the struggle for independence reunites them in Paris at a decisive moment in the conflict. The mise-en-scène uses all the tropes of the thriller and culminates in the evocation of the violent reprisals against the peaceful demonstrations of Algerian families on 17 October 1961.
BOUGHEDIR, FÉRID (1944–)
A self-taught filmmaker, but also a historian, theorist, and film critic for Jeune Afrique magazine, Boughedir was born in Hammam-Lif, Tunisia. He studied in both Paris and Rome, earning a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in African and Arab cinema, as well as a diploma in cinema studies. During the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as an academic film critic and a documentarian of cinema, writing key commentaries on the history and present state of the medium in Africa, African Cinema from A to Z and The Cinema in Africa and in the World, and directing the documentaries African Camera (1983) and Camera Arabe: The Young Arab Cinema (1987, edited by Moufida Tlatli), thus becoming one of the most important intellectual theorists of Arab cinema. Boughedir’s contribution to film theory includes a schematic classification system that categorizes films based on the relationship ascertainable between their estimable audience effects and the theoretical positions of their directors. This system refers to directors as auteurs and includes categories that describe political, moral, commercial, cultural, self-expressive, and narcissistic-intellectual functions of cinema.
Boughedir’s early work in fictional filmmaking consisted of contributing an episode to the collective feature In the Land of the Tararani (1972), codirecting Murky Death (with Claude d’Anna, 1970), and assistant-directing several foreign productions. In 1990, however, Boughedir made his first film as sole director, the acclaimed Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces, a male rite-of-passage story that was screened widely at international film festivals and which remains the most financially successful of all Tunisian films. Halfaouine was followed by another popular success, A Summer in La Goulette (1995). His Zizou / Spring Perfume (2016) concerns a young migrant from the countryside who moves to Tunis and in 2011 finds a job setting up satellite dishes, which brings him into the homes of a wide range of Tunisians with very different views on the Arab Uprisings.
BOUHMOUCH, NADIR (1990‒)
Born in Casablanca and raised in Rabat, Bouhmouch is a filmmaker and social activist whose documentaries stand as a challenge to the official discourse of Moroccan cinema. Funding for them has mostly been raised from individuals, including through crowd-sourcing, as in the case of Makhzen and Me (2011), which discusses the 20th February movement, named for the protest in February 2011—a part of the Arab Uprisings—in support of political reform, in which Bouhmouch has been active. His 475: When Marriage becomes Punishment (2013) explores the case of 16-year-old rape victim Amina, who committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist. Basta! (2013) was a product of Guerilla Cinema, a filmmaking collective in which Boumouch participates that opposes expensive production requirements and the need for permits; the film details the attempt to get authorization for a film shoot from the state-run film agency, the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM). Amussu (2019) is a documentary, but also a musical, in the Tamazight (or Berber) language, about a group of Amazigh villagers who have shut down a pipeline that diverted water from their almond grove to a silver mine. Citing comparisons with restrictions on water use among Palestinians in Israel, as well as the destruction of Palestinian film culture, Boumouch declined an invitation to show his film at the Israeli documentary film festival DocAviv.
Bouhmouch has advocated Saharawi self-determination, attending FiSahara in 2013 and narrating the story of the Green March of 1975—the event that began the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara—at the start of Life Is Waiting (Iara Lee, 2015), a film about artistic responses to occupation and displacement. He has also written against Martin Scorsese’s attendance at the Marrakech International Film Festival, where the American had claimed to be “home,” lending implicit support to the Moroccan regime. Recently, Bouhmouch has been writing and photographing for Al Jazeera English.
BOULANE, AHMED (1956–)
Ahmed Boulane began his artistic career in the 1970s as an actor for Moroccan theater and television. In the 1980s, he began working as an assistant director, then became a well-known casting director and an actor in more than 25 international films. His company, Boulane O’Byrne Productions, offers casting and production services in Morocco for international film and television projects. His first feature, Ali, Rabia and the Others (2000), starring Hiam Abbass, treats Ali’s difficult return from prison to encounter those he knew as a hippie youth in the 1960s, during Morocco’s Years of Lead, all of whom have taken different paths. The Satanic Angels (2007) is based on a true story that raised an outcry over freedom of artistic expression in Morocco in the late 1990s: the controversial arrest of 14 young Moroccan rock musicians accused of antisocial behavior contrary to Islam. The Son’s Return (2012) focuses on the difficulties experienced by a son born to a French mother and a Moroccan father in coming to terms with his own origins. Boulane also directed La Isla de Perijil (2015), a comic depiction of nationalist sentiments about a soldier stationed on an island, jurisdiction over which is contested between Morocco and Spain.
BOUREKAS
Named after a stuffed pastry indigenous to Turkey, the börek, the bourekas genre of Israeli filmmaking places uneducated, poor, and working-class Mizrahi characters into awkward and unlikely predicaments, the pain and contradictions of which are ameliorated through musical numbers and slapstick comedy. Bourekas films are examples of orientalism: they rehearse Western stereotypes meant at once to promote assimilation of Mizrahi Jews into Ashkenazi-dominated society and to construct Israeli identity in the image of a fetishized “Orient.” The most renowned bourekas film is Sallach Shabbati (Ephraim Kishon, 1964), a musical comedy starring Fiddler on the Roof’s Haim Topol as a Yemeni immigrant to Israel whose son falls in love with an Ashkenazi kibbutznik (Gila Almagor). Ra’anan Alexandrowicz would later name one of the characters in his James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003) after Shabbati. Also noteworthy is The Policeman (Kishon, 1970), the star of which, Shaike Ophir, was frequently cast in Mizrahi roles. With the advent of Young Israeli Cinema, a post-bourekas genre emerged that ostensibly took more seriously the conditions and aspirations of Mizrahi Israelis. Examples include Queen of the Road (Menachem Golan, 1971), The House on Chelouche Street (Moshe Mizrahi, 1973), Sh’chur (Shmuel Hasfari, 1994), and Three Mothers (Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006)—all of which feature Almagor.
BOUZID, NOURI (1945–)
Born in Sfax, Tunisia, Bouzid studied film at the Institut National des Arts du Spectacle et Technique de la Diffusion in Belgium from 1968 to 1972. Back in Tunisia (1972–1973), Bouzid worked for Radio-Télévision
