Claiming integration, performing exclusion: Yamina Benguigui’s documentaries

Abstract

This article examines Yamina Benguigui’s filmmaking in Mémoires d’immigrés, Le Plafond de verre / Les Défricheurs, and 9-3 mémoire d’un territoire, three documentaries that explore policies of the French government and their consequences on postcolonial immigrants and their children in France. Benguigui’s documentaries intertwine official and personal testimonies while erasing the director’s presence. I analyse the implications of this (failed) erasure, as well as the limits of Benguigui’s projects. Benguigui’s attempts to stage a dialogue between the majority population and minorities seem to depend on the suppression of controversies. The traces that remain of the interviewer point to the ever-looming presence of the director in shaping the reality presented: a reality that glosses over a failing educational system and Islamophobia.