Genre and Gender in post-1980s Algerian Cinema After independence from France in 1962, Algeria became the North African leader in cinema production, reaching international audiences with such films as Mohammed Lakhdar Hamina's 1975 feature film Chronicle of the Year of Embers, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Viewed as a vital tool of the revolution, post-independence Algerian film was predominantly state-sponsored and Algerian filmmakers became employees of the state. Despite debates regarding its dominant themes, there is general consensus among scholars that the trajectory of Algerian film, and North African film more broadly, has been overwhelmingly dominated by a social realist approach whose goal is to hold up a mirror to Algerian history, society, and/or culture. Nonetheless, even before sharp decreases in state support and civil war threw Algerian film production into crisis in the 1990s, some filmmakers had begun to experiment with styles grounded in popular local art forms or to explore how Euro-American genres might be adapted to local contexts. Examining Algerian films that, beginning in the late 1980s, break with a social realist approach to explore globally popular genres (thrillers, detective and gangster films, romantic comedies, social melodramas etc.), this paper explores how they place domestic and international conceptions of gender into productive dialogue. Scholars of American genre films argue that all genre films encode social problems, projecting upon them temporary solutions that, while not resolving the underlying social issues, promote a vision of their potential resolvability. I show how Algerian filmmakers transfer this vision to Algerian contexts, simultaneously contributing to the evolution of the genres in question and to a national cinema. The social problems addressed in genre films frequently revolve around issues of gender, and I show how representations of gender relations in recent films are reformulated by Algerian filmmakers not simply as a corrective to "foreign" representations, but as a means of exploring tensions between global and local formulations of masculinity and femininity. The paper will touch on films such as Nadir Mokneche's Almodovar-esque trilogy, Le Harem de Mme Ousmane (2000), Viva Laldjerie (2004), and Dnlice Paloma (2007), Nadia Cherabi's popular melodrama, L'Envers du miroir (2007), and Lyes Salem's international success Mascarades (2008).