Capable of straddling Arab and European sensibilities, Baghdadi’s films appealed consistently to audiences in Europe while relying on French funding. During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, he participated in Wim Wenders’s experimental film Room 666 (1982), in which a series of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg and Jean-Luc Godard, are asked whether they believe cinema is a dying language. One of two non-Western filmmakers featured, Baghdadi replies that filmmaking is a vicious cycle requiring the director to surrender life to the screen. The implied ambivalent relationship with representational power is a recurrent trope within Baghdadi’s films—and Lebanese cinema generally. Similarly, Out of Life (1990), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, provides a gripping story about the abduction of a French photojournalist during the civil war, in which the photojournalist’s bravado serves as a reflexive critique. Baghdadi died prematurely from an accidental fall at his home in Beirut.
BAHRAIN
Bahrain is an island state monarchy located in the Persian/Arabian Gulf off the east coast of Saudi Arabia, to which it is connected by a road bridge, and also lies to the northwest of Qatar across the Gulf. Like most countries on the Arabian Peninsula, Western oil companies produced some of the first documentaries in and on Bahrain. Once a major trade route stop because of its fresh water supply, Bahrain was the first Arab Gulf country in which oil was discovered, in 1931, making it the culture and business center of the Gulf during the British colonial period. Today, Bahrain has been depleted of oil and does not have the wealth of its neighbors. The failure to distribute wealth on the part of the Al Khalifa royal family has led to mass protests by citizens, predominantly the disempowered Shi‘i majority that has been brutally repressed, particularly during and since the Arab Uprisings. Narrative filmmaking arrived in Bahrain around the time of independence, with the Wonderful World of Disney’s production of Hamad and the Pirates: The Phantom Dhow (Roy Edward Disney, 1971), produced in collaboration with Shaikh Isa bin Sulman Al Khalifah, ruler of Bahrain. With its colorful images of dhows and the sea, the film was screened at Bahraini schools ostensibly to educate students about indigenous culture. The film was narrated by Syrian American actor Michael Ansara and starred Khalifa Shaheen, performing the role of the pirate captain, who went on to direct several documentaries, including Pictures of an Island (1981) and People on the Horizon (1983).
To support and facilitate local production, the Bahrain Cinema Company was established in 1967 and the Bahraini Film Production Company in 1980. Aspiring filmmakers, including Bassam Al-Thawadi, made short narrative and documentary films during the 1970s, then went on to direct narrative features. One such work, Four Girls (Hussain Abbas Al-Hulaybi, 2007), about for young women trying to start a business, opened the inaugural Gulf Film Festival in Dubai in 2008. Al-Hulaybi’s later film Longing (2010) addresses the social tension that developed in Bahrain during the 1980–1981 Iran‒Iraq War, through a Sunni–Shi‘a romance. Recent Bahraini features include The Sleeping Tree (Muhammed Buali, 2014), about a young girl with epilepsy.
As in the other Gulf states, commercial cinemas predominantly screen a mix of Indian, Egyptian, and Hollywood films. The presence of South Asians in Bahraini film testifies to historical and contemporary, cultural, political, and economic connections between Bahrain, India, and Pakistan. Moonlight (Ajith Nair, 2010) and The Metro (Bipin Prabhakar, 2011), both directed by Indians, concern the Malayali migrant community in Bahrain. Saudi-born and Bahrain-based Pakistani filmmaker Zeeshan Jawed Shah has supervised horror and horror-comedy genre films with student filmmakers: Paranorma: There Is Always a Dark Side (2011), Gilgamesh Pearl (2011), Silveraven (2012), and Dead Sands (2013). He has also worked with director Saleh Sharif on Bits of What I Have (2015), shot in Turkey, in Turkish, about an anguished writer.
BAKRI, MOHAMMED (1953–)
Born in Bina, a village in the Galilee, Bakri studied acting and literature at Tel Aviv University. He began his career as a theatrical performer in 1976, in Israel and the West Bank, followed by film acting in 1983, appearing in productions by renowned Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers Amos Gitai and Michel Khleifi. He eventually gained lead roles in Israeli, Palestinian, and European films, including Beyond the Walls (Uri Barabash, 1984), Esther (Gitai, 1986), Cup Final (Eran Riklis, 1991), Haifa (Rashid Masharawi, 1996), Yom, Yom (Gitai, 1998), Private (Saverio Constanzo, Italy, 2004), Laila’s Birthday (Masharawi, 2008), Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, 2013), and Wajib (Annemarie Jacir, 2017). Bakri is one of few Palestinian artists with a successful career in both Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic theater and cinema, often dealing with aspects of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and internal Palestinian struggles. He has also directed several documentaries, including 1948 (1998), a Palestinian interpretation of the Nakba; the more controversial Jenin, Jenin (2002), initially banned in Israel and based on Palestinian residents’ interpretations of violent clashes with the Israel Defense Forces in Jenin during the Al-Aqsa Intifada; Since You’ve Been Gone, an elegy to famed Palestinian author Emile Habibi; and Zahara (2009), a history of Palestine as told through the perspective of a woman whose life traverses the pre- and post-Nakba eras. Bakri’s son, Saleh, is also an actor in Palestinian and Israeli films, having appeared alongside his father in Wajib and Laila’s Birthday as well as in Salt of This Sea (Jacir, 2008), The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009), When I Saw You (Jacir, 2012), and the hasbara vehicle The Band’s Visit (Eran Kolirin, 2007).
BANDIT, THE (1996)
This extremely popular film of the post-Yeşilçam era (2.5 million spectators), directed by Yavuz Turgul, is considered the first financially successful production, which, as such, instigated the domestic success of contemporary Turkish cinema. The Bandit thus heralded the rejuvenation of Turkish cinema and the arrival of the new Turkish cinema, even while remaining in direct contact with Yeşilçam—to which the film stands nonetheless as a critical homage. Its story concerns a thief who, upon release from a 35-year prison term, searches Istanbul for his former lover. In the course of his quest, he observes the immense social transformation that has occurred in Turkey since his internment and comes to the conclusion that his former relationship could never be revived under present conditions. As a result, by film’s end, he commits suicide.
BANI-ETEMAD, RAKHSHAN (1954–)
Born in Tehran, Bani-Etemad is often described as Iran’s leading female director. She graduated with a degree in film direction from the University of Tehran and started her career making documentaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. Bani-Etemad’s feature film credits include Off Limits (1986), Nargess (1992), The Blue Veiled (1995), The May Lady (1998), Baran and the Native (1999), Under the City’s Skin (2001), Our Times (2002), Gilaneh (2005), and Main Line (2006). She has focused on issues faced by the impoverished and the underprivileged classes, even the criminal element, in contemporary Iran, with female characters usually depicted as resistors and survivors of hostile social situations.
In Nargess, the first film in Bani-Etemad’s City Trilogy, an older woman loses her much younger lover to the younger Nargess. Bani-Etemad turns this unusual love triangle (two of the characters are professional thieves, and Nargess is abjectly poor) not only into an exploration of two women victimized by a selfish and immature man but also into a critical appraisal of the strictly codified and patriarchal postrevolutionary Iranian society, where to move from the criminal class to the impoverished but respectable working class involves not only deception but incest.
The City Trilogy continues with the self-reflexive The May Lady, an exploration of