State restrictions—of another stripe—have also been instrumental in constraining Iraqi and Syrian filmmaking, both historically limited, as in Algeria, to state-run monopolies. Production in Ba‘thist Syria’s National Film Organization (NFO) never resulted in more than a few films per year, and the situation was little better in postindependence Iraq, either during its period of private production or during its nationalization under the Ba‘th government into the General Organization for Cinema and Theatre (GOCT). Moreover, the Iran–Iraq War and subsequent 1991 Gulf War as well as the 2003 Anglo-American invasion and occupation all but ended film production in the country. Syrian cinema, however, continued to produce a slow, uneven stream of quality films, often directed by former students of the prestigious Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow and meant ideally for domestic audiences yet frequently restricted, censorially, to international distribution due to their varied critiques, many quite allegorical, of the regime. Perhaps the most widely viewed film of this sort is Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid’s Nights of the Jackal (1989). This limited cinematic production was severely curtailed by the civil and military crisis that erupted during the 2010s, whereupon the remaining, major established Syrian directors, all quite elderly, left the country—although Oussama Mohammad, at least, has contributed a coauthored film, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), using footage shot by a collaborator still in the country. The traditionally more substantial production of televisual material in Syria has been somewhat better sustained. Because of their ostensible support for pan-Arabism, both the Syrian NFO and the Iraqi GOCT welcomed guest directors from Egypt and other Arab countries in order to lend much-needed caché to their faltering industries and to encourage international diplomacy.
Recently, cinema has emerged in Jordan, although government incentives and encouragement during the 2000s subsequently declined during the 2010s, while the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia have also started production, and still more recently have begun to institute initiatives for previously absent—or in the case of the UAE, where several high-profile international film festivals have seen their international financial backing rather suddenly withdrawn, foreclosed—opportunities for domestic exhibition. The first stirrings of cinema in Yemen, evident in the early 21st century, have not significantly materialized due to the civil and military crisis that has now engulfed and impoverished the country. The recent revival of interest in cinema in Sudan, a country from which it has been relatively absent, however, may suggest a future for the medium there, especially since the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Each of these countries is now the subject of an entry in the second edition of this historical dictionary.
Cinema and Nation in the Middle East
To a substantial degree, cinema has served to define the character of the peoples and nations of the Middle East; it has been a prominent means, that is, of narrating nationalist histories and ideologies, and thus of presenting a sense of what it means—and doesn’t mean—to be a citizen or subject of a country. As Viola Shafik has pointed out, film came to the Middle East relatively soon after the spread there of print media (newspapers and magazines) and has in many respects adopted the role of nation building attributed to the latter by Benedict Anderson through the construction of “imagined communities.” Cinema’s importance in this light is, indeed, borne out by the high degree of government control and censorship of the medium that, sadly, also characterizes the region, insofar as regulations are most commonly enforced to limit the discussion or depiction of material deemed contrary to desired images of the state.
This nation-defining capacity of Middle Eastern cinema is nowhere more apparent than in the anticolonialist films that have characterized newly independent states. Algerian cinema has commonly been seen as a textbook example of this tendency in the years following its independence from France. Early films that celebrate the liberation movement include the well-known Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by the Italian socialist Gillo Pontecorvo, a film that records an important moment in that struggle, emphasizing how Algerians fought back against a commensurably greater colonial violence. Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s expensively made, award-winning Chronicle of the Years of Embers (1975) stands as something of a national epic, seeking to further define what it means to be Algerian through an analysis, both melodramatic and starkly realist, of the prerevolutionary experience. Although Algerian cinema now covers a wider range of material, it still harkens back to its earlier defining moments from time to time.
Women filmmakers have been prominent in the critical renarration of nationalism in the Maghreb and elsewhere. Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli, probably the most influential of these, dwells explicitly on the patriarchal structures of nationalism in her Silences of the Palace (1994), a film set mostly in the days just prior to Tunisian independence but framed by a more recent time, the images of which serve to critique postindependence society. In the past, the heroine, Alia, as a girl, sings the national liberation song “Green Tunisia,” but the film opens with her adult performance of a love song by the Arab world’s most famous singer, Umm Kulthum (who supported a pan-nationalist platform). Juxtaposed with her unsatisfactory relationship with her partner, a former revolutionary, this performance serves to underscore the continued oppression of women under conditions of ostensible liberation. Tlatli was the editor of Moroccan woman director Farida Benlyazid’s compelling A Door to the Sky (1988), which also ties the nationalist project to gender oppression. In this instance, however, a Westernized Nadia, returning to Fez for her father’s funeral, gradually sloughs off her Parisian values to embrace a Sufi-influenced form of Islam—although this, too, she will eventually question. Islam’s often fraught relationship with nationalism and national identity is indeed a key topic in many fine films from the region. In Algeria, the civil war and the growth of Islamism were the subject of several of the limited number of films made in the first years of the 21st century. Documentarian Djamilia Saraoui, for example, issued a plea for tolerance in her Enough! (2006), in which the heroine’s own loss leads her to confront the violence of the country’s recent past in the context of the earlier independence struggle and the need for a peaceful future. Meanwhile, Nadia El Fani, a Tunisian director, has examined—and challenged—continued French influence with her Bedwin Hacker (2002). She also attempted to counteract an increasingly autocratic turn in the political landscape with The Children of Lenin (2007), a commemoration of her father’s socialist and cosmopolitan values, and offered a plea for secularism in Laïcité Inch’Allah (2011), which provoked an attack on the Tunis cinema in which the film was screening at the height of the revolt against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali—a formative moment in what has been called the Arab Spring but to which we refer, more inclusively, as the Arab Uprisings throughout the new edition of this volume.
El Fani’s critical nostalgia is a frequent means of instilling a sense of how a nation’s past might be used to question its present course. Tunisian Férid Boughedir’s A Summer in La Goulette (1995), for example, memorializes—and sentimentalizes—an era of religious tolerance in which Muslims coexist and interact joyfully with Christians and Jews. While Islam is the dominant religion throughout the Middle East, its practices and formations vary historically and geographically. Minority religions commonly coexist within Islamic civilization, and in Egypt, for example, a considerable and noteworthy Coptic Christian presence exists in the film industry, exemplified by directors Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah, and Henri Barakat and performers Naguib el-Rihani and Yousra. Some of Chahine’s films, in particular, celebrate the cosmopolitan character of his birthplace, Alexandria, and a tolerant Islam, personified by Saladin, leader of the Muslim Arabs against the Christian Crusaders, who nevertheless respects Christian values and includes in his army Arab Christians equally opposed to the Crusades. The full Arabic title of Chahine’s Saladin (1963)—El Nasir Salah El Din—explicitly connects Saladin to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who briefly united his country with Syria to form the United Arab Republic and who was, for a time, revered throughout the Arab world for his ability not only to redefine his own national ideology but to adapt it to the wider, pan-Arabist movement, which has inspired political liberationists to this day.