Reel Bad Arabs (2006)

Original title

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

Directed by

Sut Jhally

Genre

documentary film

Country

United States

Runtime

50 min

Rating

6.1 of 10 from 12 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary looks at how Hollywood movies have portrayed Arabs and Muslims over more than a century. It presents research showing that the vast majority of these portrayals have been negative or dehumanizing.

academicanalyticalcriticaleye-openingsoberinginformativemethodicalhistorical

What happens

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People is a documentary film directed by Sut Jhally and produced by Media Education Foundation in 2006. This film is an extension of the book of the same name by Jack Shaheen, which also analyzes how Hollywood corrupts or manipulates the image of Arabs. The documentary analyzes 1,000 films that have Arab and Muslim characters, produced between 1896 and 2000, out of which great majority, 936 titles, were negative in their portrayal, arguing that the slander of Arabs in American filmmaking has existed since the early days of the silent cinema and is present in the biggest Hollywood blockbusters today. Jack Shaheen analyzes a long series of "demeaning" images of Arabs through his presentation of various scenes from different American movies which he has studied. He argues that this image is characterized by showing Arabs either as bandits or as a savage, nomadic race, or shows Arab women as shallow belly dancers serving evil, naïve, and greedy Arab sheiks. Most important is the image of the rifle in the hands of Arab "terrorists". The film then attempts to explain the motivations behind these stereotypes about Arabs, and their development at key points in American history, as well as why it is so important today. The film showed for the first time in Washington on 8 June 2007 and then in Los Angeles in the 20 June 2007. The run time of the film is 50 minutes, with Arabic and English subtitles. Soon afterward, the film was shown successively in more than a dozen of international film festivals between 2006 and 2009 The film's estimated budget is $100,000. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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