Abstract :
The critical doxa on postcolonial filmmaking agrees that, for the past two decades, female directors in France have been using cinema to reflect on issues of transnational identity and to subvert cultural stereotypes relating to gender and race. In an article titled “Le Colonial Féminin”, Catherine Portuges (1996) notes that “French women filmmakers are calling into question France’s ambivalent relationship to its colonial past in cinematic projects that focalize first-person, introspective autobiographical narratives”. Additionally, in her own work on Maghrebi-French women’s films, Carrie Tarr (2003) observes that, since the mid 1980s, female directors have been raising important questions about immigrant women’s identities, particularly “in relation to the patriarchal values of the Algerian immigrant family”
