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of narrative structures based on close friend-
ships between beur and white French work-
ing-class youths in Le The au harem and
Bâton rouge can be seen as a bid for accept-
ance and integration into French society. At
the same time, the narrative closures of these
films offer little hope for a future multicultural
society: the couple (mixed-race or otherwise)
is not allowed to form, and the central char-
acter either returns to Algeria (Thé à la
menthe), gets arrested (Le The au harem) or
resorts to fantasy (Bâton rouge).
Both Charef and Bouchareb’s second films
depart from the tone set by the first beur fea-
tures, bringing the question of immigration
and identity into sharper focus at the cost of
box office success. Miss Mona (1987) centres
on the downfall of a poverty-stricken but pure-
hearted illegal immigrant who is enticed into
prostitution through his friendship with trans-
vestite Miss Mona. Cheb (1991) explores the
alienation experienced by two Westernized
young beurs abandoned in a hostile, unfamil-
iar Algeria, a theme also addressed by Alge-
rian film-maker Mahmoud Zemmouri. It was
left to white French film-makers to sustain the
representation of the streetwise young beur
anxiously seeking integration, in comedies like
Serge Meynard’s L’Oeil au beurre noir (1987)
and Philippe Galland’s La Thune (1991).
In the mid-1990s, a new generation of film-
makers of North African origin started mak-
ing films with a wider range of beur and
beurette roles in more complex immigrant fam-
ily set-ups, less involved in relationships with
white characters. Malik Chibane’s Hexagone
(1994), made on a shoestring budget outside
the usual production circuits and shot on lo-
cation using a local cast of amateur actors, was
called ‘the first film to be made by beurs for
beurs’. It addresses familiar issues through its
mini-narratives involving unemployed beur
youths negotiating petty crime, drugs,
generational conflict and racism, but it also
emphasizes the central characters’ subjectivity
and refuses to address a white audience
through the incorporation of white characters.
Chibane stresses the problematic identity of
beurettes, too; a theme previously glimpsed in
the work of Farida Belghoul, and further ar-
ticulated in Zaïda Ghorab-Volta’s autobio-
graphical low-budget feature Souviens-toi de
moi (1996). In Douce France (1995), Chibane
ostensibly returns to the foregrounding of a
white/beur male friendship (though the beur
is a harki), but it is the independent young beur/
Algerian women characters who dominate the
last section of the film, while the representa-
tion of the parents’ generation uses cultural
difference as a site of local colour and nostal-
gia rather than threat. Bye bye (1995), by
Franco-Tunisian film-maker Karim Dridi, pro-
vides another affectionate representation of the
extended immigrant family, although the ex-
ploration of the two brothers’ identity crisis,
faced with drug dealing and racism in down-
town Marseille or the ‘return’ to Tunisia, is
not overly optimistic. The central focus of
Ahmed Bouchaala’s melodramatic Krim
(1995), structured through the friendship be-
tween the eponymous protagonist and his
(white) prison cell mate, is the new role of the
beur as father to, and saviour of, his long-lost
drug-addicted daughter.
The release of these films coincided with a
series of white-authored films about the
banlieue, which address issues of identity and
ethnicity without the same complex represen-
tations of ethnic minority cultures and
subjectivities. Thomas Gilou’s Raï (1995) re-
works the familiar tropes of beur cinema,
while Jean-François Richet’s État des lieux
(1995) and Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine
(1995) represent the banlieue as multicultural
melting pot but foreground their white pro-
tagonists rather than problematizing black
and beur identities. There is still a need for a
plurality of representations of contemporary
France by ethnic minority film-makers.
Cinéma beur as a label appeared to have
given way to the cinéma de banlieue, but its
passing should not be regretted if it means that
an increasing number of film-makers are mak-
ing films about France as a multiethnic soci-
ety and beur film-makers are accepted within
mainstream French cinema.
CARRIE TARR
beur cinema