Al-Sabah resigns under corruption allegations. Lebanon: Where Do We Go Now?, directed by world cinema darling Nadine Labaki, becomes the highest-grossing Lebanese film. Syria: 26 January: Civil crisis breaks out as multiple forces with various foreign backers attempt, ultimately unsuccessfully, to compel the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad. Tunisia: 14 January: President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali is overthrown after popular protests. Yemen: 27 January: Revolution breaks out across the country.
2012 Egypt: 30 June: Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi is inaugurated president of Egypt. Israel/Palestine: December: The Israel Defense Forces bomb the Gaza Strip in Operation Pillar of Defense. Yemen: 25 February: President Ali Abdullah Saleh is overthrown.
2013 Egypt: 3 July: President Mohamed Morsi is overthrown in a military coup d’état. Palestine: Omar, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, becomes the first Palestinian film entirely funded by Palestinian donors.
2014 Egypt: 8 June: General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi assumes the presidency of Egypt. Iraq: January: Civil crisis erupts. Israel/Palestine: July: The Israel Defense Forces bomb the Gaza Strip in Operation Protective Edge. United Arab Emirates: The Abu Dhabi Film Festival closes.
2015 Lebanon: A record 35 films are produced in Lebanon. Waves ’98, directed by Ely Dagher, wins the short film Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival. Saudi Arabia/Yemen: January: President Mansour Hadi is overthrown following a Houthi insurgency from the north. March: Saudi attacks on Yemen begin—with support from Western powers.
2016 Iran: 4 July: Internationally renowned, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami dies in Paris.
2017 Iraq: December: Civil crisis terminates. Kuwait: The Kuwait Film Festival is inaugurated. Lebanon: The Insult, directed by Ziad Doueiri, becomes the first Lebanese film to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film category of the Academy Awards. United Arab Emirates: The Dubai International Film Festival closes.
2018 Iran: May: The United States withdraws from the Iran nuclear deal, leading to the heightening of sanctions, in four stages, against Iran, which come into full effect in November. Lebanon: Capernaum, directed by Nadine Labaki, becomes the first Lebanese film to receive a Golden Globe nomination (for that award ceremony’s 2019 installment).
2019 Algeria: 2 April: President Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigns after several months of popular protest. Iran: November: Protests regarding fuel price rises, beginning in Shiraz, lead to widespread civil unrest and a violent government response. Iraq: November: Anticorruption—and some anti-Iranian—protests lead to the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi. Lebanon: 29 October: President Rafiq Hariri resigns in the face of popular protests calling for a new government. Sudan: 11 April: President Omar al-Bashir is ousted after civilian protests lead to a loss of military support.
2020 Iran/Iraq: 3 January: The U.S. assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad escalates international tensions and portends escalating violence throughout the Middle East.
Introduction
Middle Eastern cinema is the product of multiple countries and regions, intersected by a series of recurring themes and formal strategies that can be traced through the entries in this book. Like film industries throughout the world, this cinema must operate in the shadow of Hollywood’s dominant model, although audiences in many parts of the region have also had significant exposure to Indian popular cinema (Bollywood). Egyptian cinema, sometimes referred to as “Hollywood on the Nile,” is the region’s biggest industry and historically has supplied films and filmmakers to the rest of the Arab world. Saudi Arabia has played a substantial role in the funding of Egyptian productions for some time, although Saudi Arabian cinema has until very recently seemed a contradiction in terms. Turkey and Iran have also produced large numbers of films during particular periods, and continue to do so today, mostly for domestic markets, while Maghrebi cinema, on the other hand, has typically centered around the work of independent filmmakers working outside the genre- and star-driven studio systems of the major industries. Algerian cinema, which flourished immediately after independence, all but disappeared in the early years of the 21st century, following the so-called black decade of civil strife, and is only recently beginning to revive, whereas Moroccan cinema has experienced something of an upswing through the production of world cinema vehicles as well as a small wave of genre films targeting domestic audiences. Jordan, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have only recently begun to emerge as nations with cinemas, while Iraq, under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein as well as the U.S. occupation that displaced him, has not been fertile ground for the development of an earlier-established cinema. However, films are beginning to emerge from post-Ba‘thist Iraq that may be seen as important means of self-expression and communication for a people long oppressed. This principle is true, too, for Palestinian cinema, which has, with only limited resources, produced an extraordinary corpus of challenging, often darkly humorous films that address difficult conditions for its populations in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs). In Israel, where a film industry does exist, the country’s most renowned filmmaker, Amos Gitai, has steered a largely independent course.
Much of this work is relatively little known and often hard to find in English-speaking countries, but as Western scholarly interest in the region has grown in recent years, the continued dissemination of its aesthetically and intellectually provocative films provides an empowering means for Middle Eastern filmmakers and cinéastes to offer access to information and representation of their world and cultures, much of which can serve as something of a corrective to the frequently distorted projections of Western media. After all, the influence of the West and of colonialism remains marked in the region. The positioning of entries on Palestinian and Israeli cinema as separate entities, for example, demonstrates the difficulty of acknowledging and negotiating divisions based on ethnonational distinctions and geographical borders, many of which have been determined arbitrarily by colonial powers, primarily France and Great Britain. Indeed, many well-known Palestinian filmmakers hold Israeli citizenship, and some Palestinians receive funding from Israeli sources; likewise, an important component of Israeli cinematic representation is Mizrahi, or Jewish Arab, culture, reflecting the significant proportion of that population in Israel. Some Middle Eastern states are the product of the Sykes–Picot Agreement that divided much of the Mashreq (the Arab East) and the Levant (Lebanon, Palestine, Syria) into British and French spheres of influence, respectively, at the end of World War I. Egypt, on the other hand, is perhaps the world’s oldest continually existing country, and its Pharaonic past is often addressed in the country’s more powerful—and socially critical—films. Iran is also an ancient country, but its borders have fluctuated under the influence of its own and neighboring states’ ambitions, and especially as a result of the “great game” between Britain and Russia during the 19th century. Like most of the region, its population is ethnically diverse, including Arabs and Turks as well as the stateless Kurds, whose national cinema is just beginning to develop. Turkey was, during the early years of cinema, the center of the long-standing Ottoman Empire, and has considerable Kurdish populations in its eastern regions. The countries of the Maghreb also contain minority indigenous populations, and films set in Amazigh regions, with themes relevant to the population and occasionally in Tamazight or other Amazigh languages, have been made since the mid-1990s.
Cinema in the Middle East
Films were shot and viewed in the Middle East soon after they were in Europe. First, Lumière cameramen toured the region, but soon regional
