In L'enfant endormi, Moroccan director Kassari shows how "burning" or crossing the borders illegally to become an immigrant in Europe is perceived by the women left behind. This paper will show how the initial male crossing of borders constitutes a motif that gets deployed on several levels in the film, including: a) the production (it is a transnational production with Belgium and Morocco); b) women's micropolitics (women cross the boundaries of what is permissive); c) international economics and politics (emigration, immigration); d) communication (from letter writing to audiovisual devices; from Arabic to Tamazight); e) myths (the myth of the sleeping child in his mother's womb waiting to be born). Thus, the term "burning" (the Maghrebi term used for emigrating illegally), becomes the central vehicle in the filmic narrative to show how immigration causes immense shifts in the local rural culture of Morocco. This paper will further show how the nexus of themes related to crossings haunts the filmic production of the Maghreb.

Social realism has been stigmatized as a heavy-handed art form—insisting upon a didactic relationship with the reader or viewer. This negative characterization is reductive and does not take into account the many subsets of highly nuanced art, literature, and cinema of this genre. This paper will focus on an exemplar: "Closed Doors," the debut film of Egyptian filmmaker Atef Hetata. The most important feature in social realism is its subject matter—the lives and struggles of the poor and the working class who for centuries were ignored in the world of “high art.” The goal is not to romanticize or glamorize poverty and manual labor, but rather to studiously represent them with a documentary-like accuracy. In this paper I will discuss Hetata’s adoption of many of the techniques and assumptions of literary and cinematic social realism, including his use of what I call: “the political camera.” This camera meticulously represents the gaze of a compassionate, class-conscious narrator who tells a compelling story while condemning an array of social ills in modern-day Egypt. The audience is explicitly invited to eschew what might be called a titillating gaze or an entertaining gaze in order to participate in a socio-political gaze. With its empathetic narration, its attentive focus on local conditions, its well-drawn characterizations, and its linear, tension-building structure—"The Closed Doors" achieves a high degree of artistic success while interrogating Egypt’s flaws and contradictions. Like all convincing political art—"Closed Doors" is anything but formulaic and asks some important questions: what are the attractions of fundamentalism in contemporary Egypt? What are the net results of restrictive social traditions? What ingredients does it take to transform an appealing young man into a bewildered extremist? In this presentation I will use research to contextualize the evolution of this art form and Hetata’s choice to work in this genre. A close analysis of the film’s pivotal scenes will demonstrate that the tragic ending of the film— which some have found to be objectionable and overwrought—is an organic necessity to the demands of his particular project. A careful reading of the socio-political goals of Hetata reveals that only a shocking ending will suffice. I will thus make the argument that in convincing filmmaking—genre is a critical determining factor in cinematic outcomes.

Palestinian Road Narratives From Ghassan Kanafani to Hany Abu Assad In many of his fictional writings, most notably Men in the Sun and All that is Left of You (both of which were made into films), Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani creates dystopian desert journeys in which his characters—Palestinian men emasculated and broken by the defeat of 1948 and subsequent experience with exile and loss--suffer isolation, misdirection, predation, and ultimately, death. The road in his works is a place of danger primarily because his characters travel without clear political goals. The road, then, as a dystopian place, is a reflection of the political disarray that Kanafani saw in the Palestinian condition in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This dystopia is eloquently captured in Tawfiq Salih’s The Dupes, a film adaptation of Men in the Sun. The road is constructed quite differently in Palestinian narratives today. Roads, despite their dangers and frustrations are places that Palestinians want to be in post-Oslo Palestinian fiction. Palestinians in recent works lay claim to road spaces, insisting on their right to occupy them, and engaging in performances of identity within them. This paper will examine the difference in the trope of the road in Palestinian narrative film of the early 1960s and 1970s and the mid-1990s and beyond by comparing The Dupes and feature length works by filmmakers Hany Abu Assad, and Rashid Masharawi (Rana’s Wedding, Ford Transit, and Paradise Now by Abu Assad and Ticket to Jerusalem, Waiting, and Laila’s Wedding by Masharawi). The paper will elucidate how each of these directors exploits the road movie genre (in particular the nature of the road as a public space; the ironic distance created between protagonists and the societies and spaces they travel through; and the role of space in subject formation) to comment on Palestinian changing relationships to politics and community.

Most auteur directors pursue a political agenda in many if not all of their films, and so do some commercial films. If some themes stand out, the salience of major themes varies across different countries, inviting an examination of their specific political and cultural contexts. Films critical of political regimes can be found in every major cinema of the region, in some countries their critiques have been remarkably forceful in spite of repression. Some of these critiques have been surprisingly explicit, others have had to remain quite subtle. Regime critiques in Syria, Iran, Egypt, and very recently Morocco are of particular interest. Films problematizing the position of women have been produced in most countries for a long time; they are prominent in Iran, where they constitute a response to the clerical regime, and in Tunisia, where they arise from the heritage of the emancipatory legislation of the 1950s. Some entail regime critique as they decry legislation and policies discriminating against women. Most critique patriarchal traditions that are upheld, or indeed resuscitated, by certain religious teachings. The Middle East is the heartland of Islam, but only in a few instances do films exalt religion, most notably in Iran. More commonly filmmakers have denounced Islamic fundamentalists, most notably in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Egypt, countries where conflict led to violence. Central to most of these denunciations has been a rejection of patriarchal teachings. Outright colonialism has been the focus of major films where there was a protracted armed struggle, in Libya with Lion of the Desert, and in Algeria where the government of the newly independent country began producing films in the 1960s, most of them devoted to the War of Liberation. Surprisingly few films from the region have addressed Western imperialism since the days when nationalist films denouncing British interference were common in formally independent countries such as Egypt and Iraq. However, in recent years, films critical of the United States have found a ready audience in Egypt. Some of these films implicate the regime’s support for American/Israeli policies. Palestine is the pan-Arab theme par excellence. A substantial number of films have been devoted to the Palestinian cause across the Arab world as well as in Iran and Israel. Kurds, like Palestinians, are in search of their country. Their plight, and their aspirations, have inspired a number of films by directors in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, most of them of Kurdish descent.