Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg

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СКАЧАТЬ Benhadj grew up in Algiers, studied cinema at Université de Paris, made documentaries for Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne, then directed his first feature, Desert Rose, in 1989. The film recounts, through his own eyes, the life of a young, severely handicapped boy, Moussa, who struggles to overcome his infirmities in a remote desert village. The film’s rich detail is expressed in images and sound rather than words. After directing Touchia (1993), concerning social struggle in Algeria, Benhadj continued his examination of childhood struggle in Mirka (1999), which follows an abandoned infant in the Balkans as he searches for his roots and lost mother. It stands as an indictment of rape as a tool of war. By this time, Benhadj had moved to Italy; however, in 2005, he adapted For Bread Alone from the book by Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri, about the political coming to consciousness of young Mohamed, a street urchin from a severely impoverished Tangiers family. Leaving home to avoid starvation and paternal abuse, Mohamed becomes involved in drugs, alcohol, thievery, and prostitution and is eventually arrested and imprisoned at 20. In prison, he meets a nationalist leader, learns to read and write, and, upon his release, becomes a primary school teacher working to educate children on how to escape from poverty and ignorance. Benhadj, who studied architecture, is also an accomplished painter.

      This concern for the marginalized, impoverished, and related social problems continues with Perfumes of Algiers (2012), a film about Karima, a female photographer at the height of her career in Europe who must go back to Algiers to visit her dying father, whom she ran from 20 years earlier. Once in Algiers, she attempts to get her brother, who has been sentenced for terrorism offenses, released from prison. The Star of Algiers (2016), adapted from Aziz Chouaki’s novel of the same name, raises the question of personal fulfillment. It is about a young singer and musician whose career takes off at the same time as his dream is threatened by Islamists. Matarès (2019) concerns two children who sell flowers in the market and the Roman ruins of the titular Algerian city. One, Mona, a migrant from the Ivory Coast, seeks to collect the money she needs to reach Italy in order to be reunited with her father but must overcome the antipathy of the other, local boy Said, who resents her intrusion on his territory.

      BENJELLOUN, HASSAN (1950–)

      Previously a pharmacist, Benjelloun trained in Paris at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français and has gone on to become one of Morocco’s most prolific directors. His Judgment of a Woman (2000) raises the questions of women’s rights and divorce, while his comedy The Pal (2002), enormously popular at the box office, depicts poor Moroccans struggling against the rich for their legal rights. The Black Room (2004), inspired by the book by Jaouad Mdidech, depicts the Years of Lead in Morocco under King Hassan II, when Marxists, students, and union leaders were imprisoned and tortured. Where Are You Going, Moshe? (2007) treats the historical period during which Jews were recruited to leave Morocco for Israel, told through the device of a bar owner who tries to keep at least one Jew in the village so that his bar won’t be closed, while The Forgotten People of History (2009) deals with taboos, in particular slavery and sexual exploitation, through the story of Yamna, who is thrown out of her home for not being a virgin and recruited by an organization that forces her to become a prostitute in Europe.

      BENLYAZID (BELYAZID), FARIDA (1948–)

      Farida Benlyazid is a Moroccan journalist, documentarian, screenwriter, and filmmaker known for her representations of women’s lives in scripts and personal films that often depict their oppression and attempts at liberation from patriarchy. Benlyazid studied cinema at the École Supérieure des Études Cinématographiques in Paris, from which she graduated in 1976. She returned to Morocco in the early 1980s, where she made a television film, Identité de femmes (1979), and scripted two films (A Hole in the Wall [1978] and Reed Dolls [1981]) for her husband, filmmaker Jilali Ferhati, before turning to her own feature filmmaking with A Door to the Sky (1988). She scripted two features for Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi: Badis (1988) and Looking for the Husband of My Wife (1993). Her next three directorial features were adaptations: Women’s Wiles (1999), based on a historical fairy tale; Casablanca Casablanca (2002); and The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni (2005), based on the novel by Angel Vazques. After an eight-year gap, in 2013 she directed Frontieras, about the political division of the Sahara.

      BENSAÏDI, FAOUZI (1967–)

      Born in Meknès, Morocco, Bensaïdi is an actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker who has contributed to the development of screenwriting and pioneered new directions in film aesthetics in Morocco. Trained in Rabat and Paris, he worked as a theater director before turning to film directing. His short The Cliff (1998) received many awards, as did the subsequent Le Mur (2000) and Trajets (2000). Attending rigorously to framing and shot composition, Bensaïdi weaves film form and narrative together in a relentless exploration of the impossibility of communication and the violence inherent in closed, conservative, class-bound communities.

      His feature-length A Thousand Months (2002) portrays a small child, Mehdi, who encounters the strangeness of life in a small mountain village to which he has moved with his mother, Amina, to live with his paternal grandfather after his dissident father, unbeknownst to Mehdi, is arrested on political charges. WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006) is a postmodern action film in which style is more significant than a plot that focuses on several characters, the most important of whom are a contract killer, a policewoman, and a young hacker who is attempting to migrate to Europe. Bensaïdi plays the part of the killer, whom we never see speak, with an understated, deadpan humor that references the work of Elia Suleiman. Death for Sale (2011) focuses on the friendship between three young men who live in Tetouan and, having no future prospects, decide to rob a jewelry store. Their friendship is put to the test when one of them falls in love with a beautiful but enigmatic woman who appears out of nowhere, with dire consequences for the robbery. Bensaïdi organizes the narrative into a series of three-shots of the outlaw friends, as if to portend the ultimately climactic unraveling of a doomed unity. Volubilis (2017), named after the ruined Amazigh city near the film’s setting of Meknes, explores the closed and merciless class system in Morocco, as a dull-headed shopping mall security guard, Abdelkader, and his wife, Malika, a maid in an upper-class home, are propelled into a dramatic spiral of violence as they attempt to enforce justice against Malika’s employer (Bensaïdi). Bensaïdi features in his all of these films and frequently appears in those made by others.

      BENT FAMILIA (TUNISIENNES) (1997)

      The personal lives of three women are exposed and analyzed in this contemporary Tunisian melodrama directed by Nouri Bouzid. Aida is a divorced college professor, proud of her Arab heritage but equally unashamed of her sexuality, who is in love with a Palestinian sequestered in Gaza and is criticized as promiscuous by her adolescent son. Her urban apartment has become a shelter for Fatiha, a refugee from violence in Algeria, and Amina, Aida’s former school friend now married to a wealthy banker who confines her to the home and rapes her out of jealousy. Through careful alternation between interior and exterior scenes, and from the women’s corresponding physical stasis to relative mobility, Bouzid traces each woman’s enlightenment and healing to shifting social and economic conditions in Tunisia. By film’s end, under Aida’s outspoken tutelage, Fatiha decides to return to Algeria despite and because of the challenges it presents, and Amina to divorce her husband, notwithstanding disapproval from her family and social circle.

      BERBER FILMS

      See AMAZIGH FILMS (BERBER FILMS).

      BERLIN IN BERLIN (1993)

      Set in the Turkish sector of Berlin, this transnational drama СКАЧАТЬ