Beur is Beautiful: Maghrebi-French Filmmaking

Program Director

Film Program and Symposium, IFC; The French Institute, New York

November 2007

Beur is Beautiful was a film program and symposium curated by Rasha Salti and Carrie Tarr, exploring the emergence of Maghrebi-French cinema and the cultural movement associated with the “beur” generation—the children of North African immigrants born and raised in France. The term beur (a form of French slang derived from arabe) refers to this generation, whose experiences of migration, marginalization, and cultural hybridity have profoundly shaped contemporary French cultural production.

Presented in New York at the IFC Center and the French Institute Alliance Française alongside the 2009 Cinema East Film Festival, the program brought together a selection of films that examine questions of identity, postcolonial memory, and life in the banlieues. Works by filmmakers such as Mehdi Charef and Rachid Bouchareb highlighted a growing cinematic movement addressing the social and political realities of France’s North African diaspora.