Much of this work is relatively little known and often hard to find in English-speaking countries, but as Western scholarly interest in the region has grown in recent years, the continued dissemination of its aesthetically and intellectually provocative films provides an empowering means for Middle Eastern filmmakers and cinéastes to offer access to information and representation of their world and cultures, much of which can serve as something of a corrective to the frequently distorted projections of Western media. After all, the influence of the West and of colonialism remains marked in the region. The positioning of entries on Palestinian and Israeli cinema as separate entities, for example, demonstrates the difficulty of acknowledging and negotiating divisions based on ethnonational distinctions and geographical borders, many of which have been determined arbitrarily by colonial powers, primarily France and Great Britain. Indeed, many well-known Palestinian filmmakers hold Israeli citizenship, and some Palestinians receive funding from Israeli sources; likewise, an important component of Israeli cinematic representation is Mizrahi, or Jewish Arab, culture, reflecting the significant proportion of that population in Israel. Some Middle Eastern states are the product of the Sykes–Picot Agreement that divided much of the Mashreq (the Arab East) and the Levant (Lebanon, Palestine, Syria) into British and French spheres of influence, respectively, at the end of World War I. Egypt, on the other hand, is perhaps the world’s oldest continually existing country, and its Pharaonic past is often addressed in the country’s more powerful—and socially critical—films. Iran is also an ancient country, but its borders have fluctuated under the influence of its own and neighboring states’ ambitions, and especially as a result of the “great game” between Britain and Russia during the 19th century. Like most of the region, its population is ethnically diverse, including Arabs and Turks as well as the stateless Kurds, whose national cinema is just beginning to develop. Turkey was, during the early years of cinema, the center of the long-standing Ottoman Empire, and has considerable Kurdish populations in its eastern regions. The countries of the Maghreb also contain minority indigenous populations, and films set in Amazigh regions, with themes relevant to the population and occasionally in Tamazight or other Amazigh languages, have been made since the mid-1990s.
Cinema in the Middle East
Films were shot and viewed in the Middle East soon after they were in Europe. First, Lumière cameramen toured the region, but soon regional and national cinemas began to appear. In Egypt, the earliest efforts at filmmaking involved a colonial enterprise featuring actualité films depicting tourist attractions for foreigners and local elites. The success and favorable reception of these films led to the establishment of a series of increasingly influential studios, notably Studio Misr, the first productions of which, in 1936, positioned Egyptian cinema as a purveyor of genre films. These incorporated famous singing stars such as Umm Kulthum and Mohamed Abdel Wahab—thus drawing in their already substantial audiences—and created numerous others, in an industry that became, by the 1940s, one of the world’s largest and a significant exporter to the neighboring Arab countries. This period launched the first “golden age” of Egyptian cinema, when industry opportunities attracted filmmakers from other Arab countries, especially Lebanon.
In Turkey and Iran, cinema flourished somewhat later, but eventually substantial popular industries aimed at domestic audiences developed. Like Egyptian cinema, Turkish industry or Yeşilçam cinema was born of actualité filmmaking, in this case during the late Ottoman Empire, and was influenced—as it was to a lesser degree in Egypt and Iran—by the shadow-play tradition. Under the single-party rule of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, however, Yeşilçam’s autocratic directorship constrained cinematic output, a situation that changed after World War II. Iranian cinema, too, began with the filming of actual events, first among them a royal visit to Belgium, recorded on film by the court photographer. Although early filmmakers/producers (described in the next section of this introduction) made films prior to World War II, a star-driven industry that focused on melodramas, historical epics, and song-and-dance films developed only in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the Maghreb, cinema prior to the gaining of independence was almost exclusively controlled by colonial forces, and featured films made by and for the settler population, although some of the institutions established under colonialism, such as Morocco’s Centre Cinéma Marocain (CCM), were retained following independence. Algerian cinema during this period existed only in exile in Tunisia, but—as shall be elaborated shortly—independence fostered a filmmaking practice that would permit emphasis on the oppressive nature of colonialism and celebrate the establishment of the postcolonial state. The vast majority of Algerian cinema was state funded by one of a series of film production agencies—of which the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (ONCIC) was perhaps the most significant—or by the national television network, Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne (RTA), until privatization in 1993. In the later 1990s, however, civil war, the growing influence of political Islam, and, in reaction, increasing state censorship severely limited this once very significant cinema.
In neighboring Tunisia, a state-run production agency, Société Anonyme Tunisienne de Production et d’Expansion Cinématographiques (SATPEC), was also dominant, although it failed in its attempt to control cinema distribution in the country. The mid-1960s witnessed the establishment of the major Arab film festival, held biannually in Carthage, and the Gammarth studio facilities, which, however, struggled to remain up-to-date—a factor in the impoverishment and eventual closure of SATPEC in 1994. Nevertheless, Tunisian cinema achieved an international presence in the late 1980s and 1990s, largely through the efforts of producer Ahmed Attia, working with directors and film commentators Nouri Bouzid (whose films have continued to offer a series of meditations on masculinity, gender positioning, religion, and nationalism), Férid Boughedir—also with a recent film—and editor-turned-director Moufida Tlatli. In Morocco, a significant, more widely attended cinema was slower to emerge, with the immediate postindependence government having shown little interest in supporting film. The country’s first features, sponsored by the CCM, appeared during the late 1960s, and a change in funding mechanisms led to a considerable increase in output in the 1980s, but, with Hollywood and Egyptian cinema dominating local screens, there was little chance of finding an audience or revenues. These problems have been somewhat resolved since a more generous, but also more closely monitored, system of incentives was instituted during the 1990s, whereupon Morocco now produces more films, and they are more widely seen, than is the case in Tunisia. In both countries, however, as throughout the region, dwindling distribution and exhibition opportunities remain a problem. Another issue is dependence on foreign coproduction, which remains a vital enabling condition of Maghrebi cinema. Frequently, the partnership is with France through funding mechanisms that require postproduction work to take place there. In another sense, too, Maghrebi cinema remains tied to the former colonial power, since a diasporic beur cinema—made by filmmakers who were either born in North Africa themselves or whose parents were—also exists. This movement, which came to wider attention with Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory (2006) and Outside the Law (2010), is an important part of French cinema, while its previously strong ties to the Maghreb, with many filmmakers passing back and forth between countries, have somewhat declined in recent years, and some nominally beur directors—for example, Abdellatif Kechiche—have begun to focus on topics other than the beur experience, as in his Mektoub, My Love series (2017–2019). The beginning