Cinéma-monde as a Call to Arms

This epilogue considers cinéma-monde as an urgent ‘call to arms’ at a time when western nations tend to choose populism over openness to others. After arguing that the Oscar win of Asghar Farhadi’s Forushande/The Salesman (2016, Iran/France) and its director’s powerful speech in absentia assert the vital role of film in the deconstruction of nationalism and other forms of oppression and exclusion, the author contends that cinéma-monde crucially contributes to this deconstruction in its rejection of a homogeneous ‘French’ national cinema. The epilogue proposes a fourth area of inquiry not present as a distinct category in this volume but which could be the focus of a future volume, that of reception.

Worlds Within; In the World

This epilogue underscores the fact that 'cinéma-monde' always came with a question mark: it was a hypothesis, a heuristic device, conjuring up a 'what would happen if' we looked at Francophone film production through a slightly different lens. Moving forward from this mapping of the possibilities of cinéma-monde while at the same time highlighting the persistence of the national, the essay proposes that one way to take ‘monde’ seriously is to situate Francophone film production within world history. An example taken is Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (2016, Canada), filmed in an Atikamekw community, which raises questions of colonialism, indigeneity, ecology and the cosmos. It suggests that connections can be formed in terms of parts of wholes, in other words of the worlds within, for example, Quebec or French national cinema.

‘Images of Diversity’: Film Policy and the State Struggle for the Representation of Difference in French Cinema

This chapter considers the complexity of encouraging diversity through film policy through close analyses of the best-known films supported by the program, with particular attention to successful films by French Maghrebi and other minority directors. These films will be discussed in the fuller context of their box office success and critical reception, and minority filmmaking more generally. Finally, these films will be analysed within the range of works supported by the Images de la diversité fund to assess the extent to which national agencies can promote diversity through a multicultural politics of representation. In short, this chapter asks whether, in a country known for its national cinema, a carefully constructed film policy can intervene in an ongoing cultural debate about the changing character of the nation. By considering films that incorporate a cross-Mediterranean gaze, the chapter also considers how themes of migration and immigration are treated in France and in the Maghreb.

Cinema Made in Liège: A ‘Hub’ of Francophone Belgian Filmmaking

This chapter considers the development of both ‘regional’ and ‘local’ funds and institutions – such as Wallimage and Pôle Image de Liège - that are designed to support local filmmaking activity and to entice projects to the city and the surrounding areas. This discussion engages with two key strands: (1) the attraction of co-production finance for ‘regional’ or ‘national’ film projects, and (2) the use of Liège as a production base. The first strand will develop the extent to which ‘regional’ film funds and institutions have production ‘knowledge’ on a local level. This is particularly the case for the Dardenne brothers, Bouli Lanners, Joachim Lafosse, Micha Wald, and Lucas Belvaux, whose films are all shot and located in the metropolitan area of Liège and are co-productions with France. The second strand. focuses on ‘runaway’ and minority-Belgian co-productions and considers how Liège has functioned as a key milieu for international co-productions, and how the city’s post-production facilities have been used for films such as De rouille et d’os (Jacques Audiard, 2012).

The Career of Actress Hafsia Herzi: Crossing Borders, Challenging Barriers

In 2007, Hafsia Herzi broke into the French film industry and gained international attention with her performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’sLa Graine et le mulet/The Secret of the Grain. Since then, Herzi has appeared in more than twenty feature films, and her projects and creative path reflect an overarching desire for mobility and diversity, including a notable global dimension. Consideration of Herzi’s professional trajectory as an example of a specific cinéma-monde path within the French film industry provides a productive way to think about these unique aspects of her career and sheds light on how global film roles (and the actress’s ability to speak French, English, and different dialects of Arabic) have enabled her to overcome the limitations of roles offered to her as a Maghrebi-French actress in France.

Guerrilla Filmmaking with Rachid Djaïdani

For many years, hexagonal writer-turned-filmmaker Rachid Djaïdani worked and resided outside of the French filmic establishment. With unconventional modes of filming and producing, including not working from a script, Djaïdani produced two guerrilla films that fit within a wave of guerrilla filmmaking in France, specifically his first fiction-feature Rengaine (2012) and his first documentary-feature Encré (2014). These films were self-financed and self-produced; actors were most often non-professional and handpicked from Djaïdani’s family and closest friends; and Djaïdani never received a license to film from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée. In some ways, his guerrilla filmmaking can be seen to invest the local, skip over the national, and yet nevertheless accede to the global. This chapter asks to what degree Djaïdani complicates cinéma-monde by probing where guerrilla filmmaking and France’s postcolonial ethnic minority filmmakers fit into its purview.

Activist Cinéma-monde in Paris: Filming Foreigners in the French Capital

Recent films set in Paris have called attention in various ways to the diversity of cultures, beliefs, and languages that come together in the French capital. This chapter examines four films characterized as ‘activist’. Whether it is a question of the intersecting fates of Malian or Romanian immigrants in the French capital in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (2000), the life-or-death situation of an Algerian immigrant who has been forced into prostitution in Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2001, France), the purposely hilarious socio-political activism of a young woman whose father is an immigrant from Algeria and whose newfound love is of Jewish descent in Michel Leclerc’s Le nom des gens (2010), or the spontaneous kindness a witness to a fatal hit-and-run accident shows to the Moldavian victim’s wife in Catherine Corsini’s Trois mondes (2012), it is clear that these filmmakers have turned an attentive eye to the injustices that mark the experience of those from elsewhere whose trajectories have brought them to the City of Lights.

Youth and Média-engagé: Is This West Africa’s Heterolinguistic Cinéma-monde?

This chapter investigates the heterolinguistic cinema of West Africa. Focusing on what the author designates as média-engagé, a collection of politically-engaged documentaries, videos and reportages produced by young activist citizens in Burkina Faso and Senegal, the chapter analyses four documentaries and concludes that their very presence ought to expand our understanding of cinéma-monde so that it embraces what it might otherwise disregard as marginal forms of filmmaking. The four documentaries discussed areAvec le Balai Citoyen, au coeur de la lutte (Droit Libre TV, 2014,) and ‘Le Balai Citoyen’: Smockey et Sams’K le Jah veulent assainir le Burkina! (The Citizen’s Broom’: Smockey and Sams ‘K want to sanitise Burkina Faso!) (Droit Libre TV, 2013) from Burkina Faso and Y en a marre/Fed-Up (Adams Sie, 2013) and Yoole (Le sacrifice)/ Yoole: The Sacrifice (Moussa Sene Absa, 2010) from Senegal.

Accented Mappings of France in a Globalised World: Le Havre (2011) and Samba (2014) through the Lens of Cinéma-monde

This chapter discusses two recent, and very different, films about illegal immigration to and through France: Le Havre (2011) by Aki Kaurismäki and Samba (2014) by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. This comparison between examples of alternative cinema (Le Havre) and mainstream cinema (Samba) is facilitated by the concept of cinéma-monde, which acts as a levelling field allowing all ‘accents’ as defined by Hamid Naficy – be they dominant or alternative – to be connected. Each of the two films selected for this analysis offer valuable mappings of France’s global situation. These mappings are revealed by an analysis of issues of language, accents, working practices, and mobility, and offer new ways of framing French identity.

Lost at Sea or Charting a New Course? Mapping the Murky Contours of Cinéma-monde in Floating Francophone Films

In order to demonstrate some of the multiple nodes that must be considered in any construction of a meaningful theory of ‘cinéma-monde’ (production, narrative, economic context; the migration of films, filmmakers, and actors), this chapter explores floating ‘francophone’ films. In these films, cinéma-monde is not mapped exclusively along the boundaries of French-speaking countries, regions, or zones, nor is it exclusively extra-Hexagonal. These ‘boat films’ are set on small vessels (L'iceberg by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005, Belgium) and freighters, which circulate goods but also people and languages – Diego Star (Frédérick Pelletier, 2013, Canada/Belgium), and Fidelio, l'odyssée d'Alice (Lucie Borleteau, 2014, France) – or narrate the perilous crossing by sea to European territory, as in Harragas (Merzak Alouache, 2009, Algeria/France) and La pirogue (Moussa Touré, 2012, France/Senegal/Germany). This chapter theorizes sea voyages for work and migration within the context of contemporary border theories, North-South migration debates, and cinematic production networks.