Arab women’s transnational cinema’s ‘flips’: The Man Who Sold His Skin (Ben Hania, 2021)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Given the various migrations across the Mediterranean in this postcolonial age, transnational women feminist filmmakers from the Maghreb have sometimes displaced the foci of their filmic narratives outside the borders of Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia. Rather than denouncing the weight of heteropatriarchy on the condition of women at home, they turn their attention to globalization and its ills and film new stories, aesthetics, politics, and diverse protagonists – including men – from realities outside the Maghreb. One such film is Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021), about a Syrian man migrating to Belgium. The analysis this fecund case-study at the intersection of migration, art installation, cinema, and exploitation in the age of late capitalism, examines possible directions for future transnational filmmaking, possible shifts in cinema audience(s) and screening venues, especially in a post-Covid 19 era. Ben Hania’s unique feminist perspective also translates cinematographically in a novel way of filming transnationality.