Filmmaking in the Maghreb is often considered to be a relatively recent phenomenon, having been virtually born alongside Maghrebi nations’ independence from France (Tunisia and Morocco in 1957; Algeria in 1962). And while each country's film industry has a distinct history, there are some similarities, one of which is an auteur-style production context, where filmmakers are generally responsible for all aspects of production, including financing and creation (Armes 2009: 5). The predominant film style in the 1960s and 1970s following independence veered toward realism and didacticism alongside a total commitment to the liberation struggle in ‘cinema moudjahid or “freedom-fighter cinema” ‘ (Austin 2012: 20) where cinema, as a form of communication as well as an art form, was used to pit recently formed nations against colonial France (Martin 2011: 7). Martin also argues that ‘the redistribution of discourse after independence, for instance, had to both renegotiate residual discourse of the colonialists and residual discourse of the freedom fighters (in Algeria especially) and revive and revise indigenous forms of discourse’ (15). Guy Austin has noted that following the Black Decade of the 1990s when film and video images were scarce, in the early 2000s, Algerian cinema has slowly assumed ‘the role of a vector of memory’, whether it be personal, gendered, regional, ethnic, sexual or otherwise (Austin 2012: 159). Marginalised, or glossed over by dominant colonial ideologies, and more recently by Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) or Front Islamique du Salut (FIS)2 dictums, women and Berber cultures, in particular, have provided the subject matter for many contemporary Algerian filmmakers whose films evoke the recent, as well as the deep-rooted, past, effecting a sort of return to the source, in order to understand the present and make sense of the dispossession and loss of identity that permeates contemporary Algerian history (Austin 2012: 158–9).

For women documentary filmmakers in the Maghreb, recovering fragments of submerged histories and memories goes beyond reclaiming the gaze. It is also about listening as a revolutionary gesture, and ‘giving voice’ to those silenced by official histories and telling their own stories in their own voices (Martin 2011: 57; Donadey 1999: 111–12). Writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar is arguably the first Algerian woman filmmaker to ‘give voice to’ Algerian women in film, thus paving the way for future women filmmakers.