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ABSTRACT
Given the various migrations across the Mediterranean in this postcolonial age, transnational women feminist filmmakers from the Maghreb have sometimes displaced the foci of their filmic narratives outside the borders of Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia. Rather than denouncing the weight of heteropatriarchy on the condition of women at home, they turn their attention to globalization and its ills and film new stories, aesthetics, politics, and diverse protagonists – including men – from realities outside the Maghreb. One such film is Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021), about a Syrian man migrating to Belgium. The analysis this fecund case-study at the intersection of migration, art installation, cinema, and exploitation in the age of late capitalism, examines possible directions for future transnational filmmaking, possible shifts in cinema audience(s) and screening venues, especially in a post-Covid 19 era. Ben Hania’s unique feminist perspective also translates cinematographically in a novel way of filming transnationality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Nominated in eleven international film festivals, it won awards for best scenario in Stockholm, best male actor for Yahya Mahayni in Venice, best feature narrative award at El Gouna Festival in Egypt, best screenplay award at the Critics Awards for Arab Films in Cannes, among others.
2. Her latest transnational film, Four Daughters (2023) returns to a woman-centered topic, the daughters of Tunisian mother Olfa who joined ISIS in 2016 and is situated at the crossroads of documentary and fiction, but, unlike The Challat, is dramatic in tone.
3. Its funding montage relied on Tunisian production company Cinétéléfilms (created in 1983 by Ahmed Baha Eddine Attia, this very successful production company had produced Ben Hania’s previous feature films), French company Tanit Films (created by Nadim Cheikhroukha in 2014) and Istiqlal Films, Belgian Company Kwassa Films (created by Anabella Nezri with Clément Manuel in 2014), Belga Productions and cable and TV companies VOO and Be TV, German company Twenty-Twenty Film Produktion (with Martin Hampel as production coordinator), Swedish Laika Film and Television (with the producer and filmmaker Andreas Rocksén) and Film I Väst, Turkish Metafora Media Production, and Cyprian Sunnyland Film.
4. Aoun is known for his work in Caparnaum, Nadine Labaki, 2018.
5. He is known for his sound and music in Dégage, Mohamed Zran, 2012; Timbuktu, Abderrahmane Sisssako, 2014; Beauty and the Dogs, Kaouther Ben Hania, 2017; Under the Fig Trees, Erige Sehiri, 2022.
6. Sometimes, the transnational teams cross-pollinate elements grounded in their cultural milieu to the making of the film, while at other times, the culture of a particular funder remains ‘unmarked’ (Mette Hjort, 2010: 13–14).
7. Caillé, Patricia & Forrest, Claude. « Coopérations Sud-Sud : cinéastes maghrébines à l’œuvre », Langues, Cultures, Communication -L2C- Vol 2, No 1, January-June 2018 : 55.
8. e.g., Moroccan Lila Kilani’s On the Edge premiering in Cannes’s sideline Directors’ Fortnight in 2008 as did Moroccan Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved in 2015; Moroccan Hicham Lasri’s films selected for sideline competitions at the Berlinale five year in a row (2014–2018); Tunisian Leila Bouzid’s As I Open my Eyes, selected at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015; Moroccan Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Kaftan screened at the 2022 Cannes ‘Un Certain Regard’.
9. Shohat, Ella. Ed. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998: 1.
10. Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Biopolitics and the Right of Man’, 1998.
11. See Higbee, Martin, and Bahmad (2020), 151–152.
13. L’Homme qui a vendu sa peau : Dossier de Presse : 4 & 6. https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/55/124/228407/presse/l-homme-qui-a-vendu-sa-peau-dossier-de-presse-francais.pdf
14. Since Baccar’s, Srour’s and Wassaf’s 1978 manifesto, Maghrebi women have made many films. Although their access to filmmaking has been even more problematic than for their male colleagues, their output since the early 2000s has grown tremendously. (A period with the confluence of several events of global proportions: the digital disruption and the digitization of filmmaking, the film festivals born after 9/11 that awarded resources to make Arab films, a renewed commitment from Arab states in the Maghreb to fund their cinema).
However, their distinct cinema has diverged from a national cinema eager to promote the liberated, reborn country and its culture after foreign occupation. A brief history of Maghrebi women’s filmic narratives points to three phases: 1) women’s histories of the nation that resisted male official narratives (e.g. Assia Djebar’s The Nubah of the Women of Mount Chenoua, Algeria, 1979; Selma Baccar’s Fatma 75, Tunisia, 1976); 2) women’s resistance to Arab and/or Western patriarchal systems (e.g. Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace, Tunisia, 1994; Selma Baccar’s Flower of Oblivion, Tunisia, 2006; Yasmine Kassari’s The Sleeping Child, Morocco, 2004); 3) political and social commentaries on their country before and after the Arab revolution (e.g. Layla Marrakchi’s Marock, Morocco, 2005; Lila Kilani’s Our Forbidden Places, Morocco, 2008; Leyla Bouzid’s As I open my eyes, Tunisia, 2015).
15. Shohat, Ella. Ed. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998: 1.
16. ‘This implies the difficult task of avoiding the fetishisation of the other, by universalising the condition of displacement, such as that enacted by the refugee described by Giorgio Agamben, as something we all experience’.
Ponzanesi, Sandra. ‘Transnational Feminism in Film and Media’. Third Text. Vol 25. No 3: 354.
17. Jeffrey’s khol-lined eyes are a conscious evocation of Mephistopheles as is clear when he meets Sam.
What do you think you are? A jinny?
Well, sometimes, I think I am Mephistopheles.
You want my soul?
I want your back.
18. Williams, Linda. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess Film Quaterly. Vol 44 No 4. Summer 1991: 2–13.
19. Jameson, Fredric (1983): 114.
20. Foucault, Michel (1976): 185. (my translation).
21. The Skin was first published in The New Yorker in 1952.
22. See the premise for Ali Zaoua by Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch (2000), for instance.
23. It parallels the trafficking of sexual workers : being willing to loan one’s back to the painter is even seen by some as a sure sign of gay prostitution, as the Syrian FB posts about Sam make clear at some point in the film.
24. Shohat, Ella, ed. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998: 24.
25. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of Film: 164.
26. Moroccan director Farida Benlyazid, for instance, resisted making experimental films for workers, saying ‘They too want to see beautiful films’.
27. Colvin, J. Brendon (2017): 194.
28. ‘Dorsality is not always used to jar the viewer through defamiliarization or keep her at a distance from characters; it can also be used as an alternative form of establishing proximity to characters, even encouraging alignment with them’. (202).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Florence Martin
Flo Martin is Dean John Blackford Professor of French Transnational Studies. She holds a Doctorate from Université de la Sorbonne, Paris III, and has published articles and book chapters internationally on the blues, francophone literature and French and francophone cinema. Her recent work focuses on postcolonial cinema, the cinema of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) and French and Francophone women’s films. Her publications have appeared in Canada, Egypt, France, Morocco, Cataluña, Tunisia, the UK, and the US. She regularly offers courses cross-listed with the Arabic and Communications programs.