Traditions in World Cinema
General Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer
Founding Editor: Steven Jay Schneider
This series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural cinema which constitute a particular tradition.
POST-BEUR CINEMA
North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000
WILL HIGBEE
Since the early 1980s, filmmakers of Maghrebi origin have made a key contribution to the representation of issues such as immigration, integration and national identity in French cinema. However, they have done so mostly from a position on the margins of the industry. In contrast, since the early 2000s, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers have occupied an increasingly prominent position in on both sides of the camera, announcing their presence on French screens in a wider range of genres and styles than ever before.
This greater prominence and move to the mainstream has not automatically meant that these films have lost any of the social or political relevance of Beur cinema of the 1980s or the banlieue film of the 1990s. Indeed in the 2000s these films have increasingly questioned the boundaries between national, transnational and diasporic cinema, whilst simultaneously demanding, either implicitly or explicitly, a reconsideration of the very difference that has traditionally been seen as a barrier to the successful integration of North African immigrants and their descendants into French society.
Through a detailed study of this transformative decade for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in France, this book argues for the emergence of a Post-Beur cinema in the 2000s that is simultaneously global and local in its outlook.
An absorbing introduction to this key development in contemporary French cinema, Post-Beur Cinema is essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, French Studies and Diaspora Studies.
Will Higbee is Senior Lecturer in French and Film Studies at the University of Exeter.
Cover image: Hafsia Herzi in La Graine et le Mulet © Pathé Renn Productions/The Kobal Collection.
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Will Higbee is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on cinemas of the Maghreb and their diasporas, as well as questions of national and transnational cinema. He is the author of Post-Beur Cinema (2013) and co-editor of De-Westernizing Film Studies (2012).
Introduction: from immigrant cinema to national cinema; 1.The Maghrebi-French connection: diaspora goes mainstream; 2. Colonial fracture and the counter heritage film; 3. Of spaces and difference in the films of Abdellatif Kechiche; 4. Home, displacement and the myth of return: journey narratives in the 2000s; 5. Screening Islam: cinematic representations of the Muslim community in France in the 2000s; 6. Conclusion: Post-Beur cinema; Bibliography; Endnotes