Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmakers in France since 2000 by Will Higbee (review)

Will Higbee’s Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000 is a thorough and captivating study of Maghrebi filmmaking in France. Throughout the book’s seven chapters, Higbee investigates the new and regular presence of Maghrebi films among top-grossing productions as well as in the context of other developments taking place in the 2000s. The strength of the book is to assemble films and filmmakers according to their trajectories, genres, or themes, which enables Higbee to relentlessly compare, contrast, and reassess them. Impeccably organized, Post-Beur Cinema is a powerful invitation to understand the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary Maghrebi filmmaking.

The first step to recognizing the diversity of post-beur cinema, Higbee claims, is to consider the diverse origins, traditions, and histories that inevitably influence it. Higbee laments the fact that current language practices commonly disregard differences within the French Maghrebi community. The scholar, therefore, cautiously designates an individual who was born in France as a “Maghrebi-French” and an individual who only moved there later as an “North African émigré.”

Higbee’s ingenious and (at first) intriguing term “post-beur” also conveys multiple implications. Most evidently, it contrasts Maghrebi filmmaking in the 2000s with the beur cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, which Higbee defines and surveys in the introduction “From Immigrant Cinema to National Cinema.” Because they critically portrayed life in the working class and neglected suburbs (the banlieue), beur films evoke to this day “integration, racism, delinquency, identity and belonging in France” (9). In the 1990s directors sought to move away from the restrictive, but strategic, essentialism of beur cinema and filmmakers and actors of the next decade will further break away with “immigrant cinema” by exploring new genres and motives.

Chapter Two, “The (Maghrebi-)French Connection: Diaspora goes Mainstream,” examines the advancement of Maghrebi filmmaking into the French mainstream. Box-office results show that the commercial break-through of Djamel Bensalah’s first comedy Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (1995) would not only launch the career of star actor Jamel Debouzze but also generate a growing demand for top-grossing comedies. While the low-budget Le Ciel did not pioneer the use of humor in Maghrebi filmmaking, it creatively challenged stereotypes about the Maghrebi youth by eschewing the traditional setting of the banlieue. The subsequent analyses of Bensalah’s big-budget Neuilly sa mère! (2009) and Beur sur la ville (2011) convincingly show how the potential for challenging stereotypes decreases when Maghrebi filmmaking falls back on formulae imposed by “other mainstream, majority-ethnic-authored comedies dealing with issues of exclusion, difference and multiculturalism” (60).

Moving beyond comedy, Chapter Three focuses on the counter-heritage genre, which Higbee sees as a “reaction” to heritage films, “the most conservative, middlebrow and hegemonic of representational trends in French cinema” (66). Relying on French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of the “lieux de mémoires,” Higbee discusses the films he considers to have challenged the official history of France with its former North African colonies in particular, Algeria. Here, he includes the lesser-seen films of one female filmmaker Yamina Benguigui (Inch’allah dimanche) and Mehdi Chareb’s Cartouches gauloises, as well as Rachid Bouchareb’s big-budget productions Indigènes (2006) and Hors-la-loi (2010). Higbee’s glowing reviews of Bouchareb’s movies reveal that the antagonistic receptions were largely due to the narratives the films chose to tell rather than a lack of technical mastery. For example, the conciliatory portrayal of Maghrebi troops participating in the liberation of Nazi-occupied France in Indigènes earned the movie its institutional recognition and mass success. For Higbee, there is no doubt that the confrontational depiction of the violence perpetrated by the French army during the Algerian war caused the hostility surrounding Hors-la-loi before, during, and after its screening at the Cannes Festival.

Chapter Four, entitled “Of Spaces...