AVŞAR, HÜLYA (1963–)
After a brief stint as a professional swimmer, Avşar won Miss Turkey of 1982, from which she was later disqualified because her forbidden divorced marital status was discovered. Avşar turned to cinema: becoming a sex symbol throughout the 1980s, she played women spanning the moral spectrum in genre films such as Call Girls (Osman Seden, 1985) and Guilty Youth (Orhan Elmas, 1985). She acted subsequently in post-Yeşilçam films such as Berlin in Berlin (Sinan Çetin, 1993), as a Turkish migrant worker, and Mrs. Salkım’s Diamonds (Tomris Giritlioğlu, 1999), in which she plays a member of a non-Muslim ethnic minority. However, the dissolution of Yeşilçam compelled Avşar to seek additional work in the music and television industries. She has recorded several albums and remained active in her later career as a television host and a film, theater, and television actor.
AYOUCH, NABIL (1969–)
Of Moroccan ancestry, Ayouch was raised in France, mostly in the Paris suburbs (banlieues) populated by immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, but has been living primarily in Morocco since the mid-1990s. Ayouch studied theater in Paris but began training on film projects rather than attending a school. From 1992, he made commercials for Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa and several shorts. In 1997, he directed his first feature, Mektoub, a detective “road movie” based on a true story that exposes the abuse of power, corruption, and social inequality within Moroccan society and the hashish trade. In this tale, a young woman attending a conference in Tangiers with her husband is kidnapped and raped by powerful men but rebuilds her marital relationship during a trip to the south of Morocco. Immensely popular at the Moroccan box office and in France, the film officially represented Morocco at the 1999 Academy Awards. In that year, Ayouch set up his production company, Ali’N Production, in Casablanca, and for several years produced a television series, Lalla Fatima, while also establishing several venues through which Moroccan youth could produce short films.
Ayouch’s second feature, Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (2000), set on the streets and docksides of Casablanca, broke box office records. His One Minute Less of Sunshine (2002), a thriller in a style similar to Mektoub, was denied release in Morocco due to sexually explicit scenes featuring a transvestite protagonist. A subsequent “road movie,” Whatever Lola Wants (2006), continues this critical integration of gender and sexuality issues, this time on an international scale. Shot in Morocco but set largely in Cairo, it concerns an American woman who, having studied belly dancing with a gay Egyptian living in the United States, goes to Cairo in an attempt to reconcile with her estranged Egyptian boyfriend but finds herself searching for the famed but reclusive belly dancer Ismahan instead.
Much Loved (2015) created a huge controversy in Morocco, where it was banned because of its subject matter: the prostitution of Moroccan women in clubs that cater to wealthy patrons, mostly from the Gulf states. The fiction depicts sympathetically the tough lives of four such women, who rely on group solidarity to overcome the stigma they must endure while coping with family responsibilities. His next film, Razzia (2017), set mostly on the streets of Casablanca and covering the years from the 1980s to 2015, focuses on the lives of five protagonists from different backgrounds, all of whom must struggle against a repressive government. Ayouch uses references to the classic Hollywood film Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)—none of which was shot in Morocco—to self-reflexively juxtapose romantic ideals with harsh reality.
B
BAB EL-OUED CITY (1994)
Set during the 1988 riots against austerity measures imposed by the Algerian government to offset collapsing oil prices and currency devaluations, Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-Oued City is the story of Boualem, a young baker so tortured by incessant religious harangues from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque that he tears one down from the roof of the bakery. Depicted through extended flashback and framed by letters written to him by his sympathetic lover, Yamina, once he has left the country, Boualem’s act spurs a variety of retributions, especially by an Islamist militia that considers it blasphemous. The film’s layered plot and visual structure, however, help construct a sense of fear and anxiety that allegorizes the militants—whose leader is Yamina’s brother—to a larger, shadowy enterprise of national consolidation and control, and that finally compels the socialistically minded Boualem to escape to France. French is spoken at points throughout the film by characters associated with the militia and former French colons. The film was shot in secret during the civil strife that occurred in the wake of the 1988 riots.
BABAÏ, BRAHIM (1936–2003)
Babaï graduated from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in 1963, worked for French and Tunisian television, then moved into filmmaking with shorts, documentaries, and finally features. His films are examples of a neorealist cinema of engagement, representing an attempt to reach a wide range of viewers and offer accessible solutions to social problems in Tunisia. His first feature, And Tomorrow? (1971–1972), adapted from Abdelkader Ben Cheikh’s novel, is one of the first Tunisian films to investigate issues of social concern during the 1960s, such as rural exodus, unemployment, and famine. The story follows three rural farmers who leave their drought-stricken village for the city. Babaï’s much later The Night of the Decade (1991), adapted from Mohamed Salah Jerbi’s novel, is a political crime intrigue depicting the Algerian unionization crisis that erupted in violence during the late 1970s. Its story is told through the lens of several students caught up in events. An Odyssey (2001–2004), inspired by Abdelaziz Belkhodja’s novel The Ashes of Carthage and considered Tunisia’s first film in the thriller genre, offers a critical perspective on transnational trafficking in art and cultural objects.
BAB’AZIZ (THE PRINCE WHO CONTEMPLATED HIS SOUL) (2005)
See DESERT TRILOGY.
BACCAR, SELMA (1945–)
Born in Tunis, Baccar studied cinematography in Paris and became the first Tunisian woman to direct a narrative feature film in that country: Fatma 75 (1976) explores contradictions between traditional and modern aspects of Tunisian society and culture, highlighting celebrated women and other eminent figures of the Berber independence movement. Her second directorial feature, Dance of Fire (1994), dedicated to the memory of a Jewish Tunisian singer of the 1920s, continues Baccar’s interest in the representation of Tunisian women. It introduces the singer at the peak of her popularity and recounts her activities during that period, from her celebrated salon in Tunis through her travels to Europe to her return and untimely death—a crime of passion—in 1927. Her third feature, Flower of Forgetfulness,