Reframing Difference

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Reframing difference' is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, 'cinéma beur' (films by young directors of Maghrebi descent) and 'cinéma de banlieue' (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city housing estates). These films mobilise the voices and narratives of France's most stigmatised postcolonial others to address issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French. Carrie Tarr's insightful account of the development of 'beur' and 'banlieue' filmmaking - from the 1980s to the present and from the margins to the mainstream - draws on a wide range of films, including Mehdi Charef's 'Le Thé au harem d'Archimède' (Tea in the Harem), Mathieu Kassowitz's 'La Haine' (Hate) and Djamel Bensalah's hit comedy, 'Le ciel, les oiseaux... et ta mère' (Boys on the Beach). Her analyses compare the work of male and female, majority and minority filmmakers at particular junctures, and emphasise the significance of authorship in the representation of gender and ethnicity. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that films by directors of Maghrebi descent challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture. This timely book is essential reading for all those interested in the relationship between cinema and citizenship in a multicultural society.