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List of contents
Introduction, Andrea Khalil
Kevin Dwyer. "Moroccan Cinema and the Promotion of Culture", Anthropology, American University in Cairo
Brian T. Edwards. "Marok in Morocco: Reading Moroccan Films in the Age of Circulation", English and Comparative Literature, Northwestern University.
Robert Lang. "Sexual Allegories of National Identity in Nouri Bouzid’s Bezness (1992)", Cinema, University of Hartford.
Andrea Khalil. "The Myth of Masculinity in the Films of Merzak Allouache", Comparative Literature, Queens College, City University of New York.
Hakim Abderrezak. "The Modern Harem in Moknèche’s Le Harem de Mme Osmane and Viva Laldgérie". French and Francophone Studies, University of Minnesota.
Josef Gugler. "Ali Zaoua: The harsh Life of Street Children and the Poetics of Childhood". Sociology, University of Connectitut.
About the author
Andrea Khalil is a professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY and of French and Francophone Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of The Arab Avant-Garde: Experiments in North African Art and Literature.
Summary
This book provides insight into contemporary film production from North African countries referred to as the Maghreb. Focus is both on the socio-economic context of film production, which suffers some of the same setbacks and obstacles as other regions of the developing world, and on the thematic details treated in the films themselves. The book delves into ideas such as gender and sexuality, national identity, political conflict, and issues of post and neo-colonial relationships in the context of globalisation.
The book includes close analyses of individual films which at times show the taboo subjects of sexual and substance abuse, the lives of street children, and prostitution, as well as upper-class contradictions between an increasingly global position of privilege while in the midst of a traditionalist society. Others chapters focus on an individual filmmakers’ world view as depicted in representations of contemporary daily life of the average Tunisian, Moroccan or Algerian. The book provides an understanding of day to day existence in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria as depicted by local artists. The theoretical questions raised stretch beyond this topic to touch on ‘third world’ art and film production, and production in conditions of political repression and rigid moral conservatism.
