Coming of Age in ‘the Hood’: The Diasporic Youth Film and Questions of Genre

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s there has been a surge of European films featuring the identity struggles of adolescents from ethnic minority backgrounds. They include British Asian films such as East Is East (1999, dir. Damien O’Donnell), Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha), Anita and Me (2002, dir. Metin Hüseyin) and black British films such as Rage (1999, dir. Newton Aduaka), Bullet Boy (2004, dir. Saul Dibb) and the early precursor Pressure (1976, dir. Horace Ové). Turkish German features are Yasemin (1988, dir. Hark Bohm), Geschwister – Kardesler/Brothers and Sisters – Kardesler (1997, dir. Yüksel Yavuz), Aprilkinder/April Children (1998, dir. Yüksel Yavuz), Auslandstournee/Tour Abroad (2000, dir. Ayşe Polat) and Karamuk (2004, dir. Sülbiye Günar). Maghrebi French films include Le Thé au harem d’Archimède/Tea in the Harem (1985, dir. Mehdi Charef), Le Gone du chaâba/The Kid from the Chaaba (1998, dir. Christophe Ruggia), Le Ciel, les oiseaux…et ta mère!/Boys on the Beach (1998, dir. Djamel Bensalah), La Squale/The Squale (2000, dir. Fabrice Genestal), Samia (2000, dir. Philippe Faucon), L’Esquive/Games of Love and Chance (2003, dir. Abdellatif Kechiche) and Le Grand voyage (2004, dir. Ismaël Ferroukhi). Considering a number of these films in more detail, this chapter applies a quintessentially American critical paradigm, genre criticism, to European films about diasporic youth and asks to what extent these films conform to the generic conventions of the ‘teenpic’ or ‘youth film’.