ABSTRACT
“Algerian women filmmakers and their resistance to violent Islamic fundamentalism” compares the crossed representations of the post-Islamist era in the contemporary Algerian film industry using seven major films on the struggle and resistance of women in the 1990s. During the first decades following independence in 1962, Algerian films displayed a feminist approach but were directed by male filmmakers, Mohamed Bouamari, Mohamed Chouikh, and Sid-Ali Mazif being the most renowned. In his last film, The Patio (2017), Mazif offers striking advocacy for the situation of female bachelors in an increasingly conservative society. Due to novelist-filmmaker Assia Djebar's feminist stance, Algerian women started their own filmic representations of Algerian society, which were different from those of their male counterparts. When civil war broke out in the 1990s, while men remained silent for a long time, Algerian women became aware that they would have the most to lose. It is in this context that Algerian women film directors took to their cameras in an attempt to resist all types of domination and violence, including Islamic fundamentalism, tradition, and misogyny.
