This paper compares the work of two groups of independent filmmakers working in Jordan, Wassif Sheikh Yassin and his codirectors and the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. It examines how Yassin’s Struggle in Jerash and the Cooperative’s works each reflect and respond to developments in Hashemite Jordanian national discourse. The paper defines this Hashemite discourse as the narrative of why Jordan’s Hashemite rulers are legitimate, which has historically rested on their custodianship of religious and cultural sites, Arab nationalist credentials, and blending of modernity and tradition. I argue that Struggle in Jerash is a celebration of these tenants of Hashemite Arab nationalist discourse, in contrast to the work of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative, which reflects a consciousness of the failures of a similar, but slightly modified Hashemite Jordanian nationalism that developed after Black September and focused more on creating a salient Jordanian national identity to the detriment of Palestinian-Jordanians and the residents of Amman. The paper advances this argument through a close analysis of several films, on which there is a noticeable paucity of scholarship, including Struggle in Jerash, I am Ready, Growing up in Amman’s Suburbia, and Sharar. It focuses on the sites and spaces of 1950s and 2000s Jordan, and how each group of filmmakers treats them, their choices about what to include, and what cinematic techniques they use to situate these places, be they Jerusalem’s holy sites or Amman’s decaying urban periphery within Hashemite Jordanian national discourse. It ultimately concludes that the dissonance between Yassin’s work in 1957 and the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative’s work in the 2000s is a result of several factors: contemporary disillusionment with both iterations of Hashemite discourse, the exclusion of urban Palestinians from national identity, and the worsening material conditions in Amman’s urban periphery.

Since 2013, Egypt’s main security services have expanded their digital surveillance capacities and have used the internet to conduct arrest and censorship campaigns against a variety of actors. Despite this intensification, scholarship on post-Arab Spring Egypt has rarely taken up surveillance, particularly in the realm of cultural production. This presentation responds to these lacunae by, first, investigating some of the directions digital surveillance has taken in Egypt between 2013 and the current moment. I demonstrate that the Egyptian security services have increased their capacities of both mass and targeted digital surveillance through acquiring new techniques and technologies. Furthermore, I argue that this intensification of mass and targeted surveillance provokes new visual forms capable of representing a society structured by surveillance. Here, I turn to Marwan Hamed’s 2017 film Al Asleyeen (The Originals, written by Ahmed Mourad) as a cinematic exploration of the elimination of the distinction between watcher and watched within a context of intensified surveillance. In its narrative, the film tells the story of a middle-age man whose life is interrupted when he receives a mysterious delivery of a phone containing images of himself and his family and is invited by the phone’s sender to become part of a shadowy surveillance network. Complementing this narrative, the film uses a number of formal techniques to question the distinction between watcher and watched. By layering what surveillance film and television scholar Sébastian Lefait calls “surveillance shots” and shifting between horizontal and vertical perspectives, Al Asleyeen creates an experience of what I refer to as disorientation—the inability to distinguish between watcher and watched—for the film’s protagonist and for the viewer. Al Asleyeen thus presents an example of Egyptian popular cinema developing a set of narrative and visual techniques suited to a society permeated by surveillance.

Released in 2006 in France, Rachid Bouchareb’s movie Indigènes (Days of Glory) concentrates on the contribution of North African soldiers in the liberation of France during the Second World War in its battle against the German Nazi occupiers. The film features prominent actors from Maghrebian origins like Jamal Debbouze, Samy Naciri, Sami Bouajila, and Roschdy Zem and won the 2016 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. Some critics relate the movie’s success to its role as a militant film that demands urgent action from the government and its ability to transform the French public perception of indigenous North African soldiers into France’s collective memory and historiography. This paper sets out to analyze issues of authorship, genre and reception in Rachid Bouchareb’s movie. It explores how Bouchareb positions himself as an author/ historiographer who commits himself to the rewriting of France’s official history by incorporating the Beur community into the space of the nation and by relying on the star images of his successful A-list actors to serve as models of integration for youths from Maghrebian origins. It equally articulates how the film does both consolidate and challenge the conventions of the American war film genre by its reliance on the myth of the able-bodied, heterosexual hero soldier whose needs for domesticity are replaced with “hegemonic” iterations of masculinity that could be expressed only alongside other subordinated “fragile” ones. It also interprets the use of distinctive aesthetics from the American war film genre such as photography, editing, multiple short shots, and huge explosion sounds. It finally analyses how the film has been received in France, the UK, and the USA and the ways by which it offers different strands of cinematic transnationalism by studying the online customer reviews, star ratings, and the physical altering and modification (mainly the DVD covers, the placement of logos and translations of the movie title) in its circulation outside its “national” boundaries.