Post-Beur Cinema: North African Emigre and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France Since 2000

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 emigre 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 emigre 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.
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Dr Will Higbee is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter (UK). He is the author of Mathieu Kassovitz (MUP, 2006) and has published widely on contemporary French cinema and diasporic filmmaking in France in journals such as Cineaste, Modern and Contemporary France and Studies in French Cinema.