Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France

North African immigrants, once confined to France’s social and cultural margins, have become a strong presence in France’s national life. Similarly, descendants of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have gained mainstream recognition as filmmakers and as the subject of films. The first collective volume on this topic, Screening Integration offers a sustained critical analysis of this cinema. In particular, contributors evaluate how Maghrebi films have come to participate in, promote, and, at the same time, critique France’s integration. In the process, these essays reflect on the conditions that allowed for the burgeoning of this cinema in the first place, as well as on the social changes the films delineate.


Screening Integration brings together established scholars in the fields of postcolonial, Francophone, and film studies to address the latest developments in this cinematic production. These authors explore the emergence of various genres that recast the sometimes fossilized idea of ethnic difference. Screening Integration provides a much-needed reference for those interested in comprehending the complex shifts in twenty-first-century French cinema and in the multicultural social formations that have become an integral part of contemporary France in the new millennium.

Sylvie Durmelat is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Fictions de l’intégration: du mot beur à la politique de la mémoire. Vinay Swamy is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Vassar College and the author of Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Belonging in Contemporary French Novels and Films.