Colonial Fracture and the Counter-Heritage Film

The question of memorializing France's colonial past has been a prominent and contested issue in French politics and the media in the 2000s. This chapter considers how Maghrebi-French filmmakers have chosen to represent the Franco-Maghrebi colonial past and in particular the Algerian War and the history of North African immigration to France. Through case studies of four key films – Inch'allah dimanche, Cartouches Gauloises, Indigènes and Hors-la-loi – the chapter argues for the emergence of a postcolonial ‘counter-heritage’ cinema to challenge the Eurocentric representations of French colonial history offered by the middlebrow heritage film in French cinema of the 1990s and 2000s.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Immigration · Media studies · Middlebrow · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · North African History and Literature