Growing up in Algeria, love felt innocent. It was there, not in bold declarations but in subtle glances, in silences. As I grew older, that innocence faded. The world felt heavier. And what I saw on screen reflected that shift. Romance became scarce, intimacy even more so. I began to wonder: why has love become so difficult to portray in our films
Cinema in the Maghreb has long been a space of collision. Love, politics, and religion often meet in uneasy tension, watched over by both official censors and invisible ones. Intimacy is often removed before the audience ever sees it. The silence around it speaks volumes.
In Algeria, after independence, filmmakers turned their focus to the revolutionary struggle. Love stories were not completely erased, but it lost its central place as if there was no room for desire while the nation was still defining itself. And yet, love has never been just about desire. It has always been about survival, defiance, and resilience. Take L’Opium et le Bâton (1971), where love is not front and center but still present. It weaves through the story like a thread, quiet but insistent. In moments of oppression, tenderness becomes a form of resistance.
In Morocco, the cost of crossing lines has sometimes been erased. Mostafa Derkaoui’s About Some Meaningless Events (1974) disappeared because it exposed many uncomfortable truths. Even a love scene could jeopardize a film’s existence, so filmmakers learned to speak in code. A look, a pause, a gesture could replace entire conversations or interactions.
In Tunisia, even before the revolution, the boundaries of what could be shown were tightly controlled. Not just by political forces, but by something even more enduring: social pressure, family expectations, the fear of shame, the idea of ‘el hchouma’ was stronger than any written law or bill.
Censorship here is not always an institution. It is often a presence that shapes not only what is filmed but what can be imagined. Every censored kiss, every redirected storyline, alters how generations understand themselves, their feelings, and their desires. The Maghreb cannot be separated from the taboos that shape it. Love is never just a feeling. It is a subject weighed down by politics, religion, and morality. In societies where religion remains a guiding force, there are boundaries to what can be shown or even suggested.
Back in 1987, journalist Abdou B. wrote in CinémAction that many Arab filmmakers had internalized censorship so deeply that they no longer needed to be told what was forbidden. They simply avoided it. He wrote, “I haven’t seen a single kiss in all Algerian films. And yet, no law forbids it.” It was not legislation but collective conservatism that did all the work.
Today, we see cracks in that wall. Films like Tlamess (2019) from Tunisia have begun to push against those limits. These moments of intimacy are not provocation but attempts at honesty. They reflect lives that exist in private but are never allowed to surface in public.
When I spoke with Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim, he told me that the female body remains the ultimate taboo. Representing romantic love implies desire, and desire implies sexuality. In many of our cultures, anything connected to women’s bodies is immediately sexualized and therefore, pushed to the margins of society.
He was not calling for erotic cinema. He was talking about romantic love. But because of how tightly love and sexuality are tied together in our imagination, even a gentle moment can feel like a transgression. “The moment a woman expresses affection on screen, the conversation shifts,” I remember him saying.
To navigate these constraints, many filmmakers turn to humor. Comedy has a strange way of making things acceptable. Laughter can hide the weight of what is being said, becoming a strategy for survival, for saying what cannot be said outright.
Take Boussa (2023), a short Algerian film by Azedine Kasri. It is a romantic comedy about a couple trying to find a place to kiss. Simple, absurd, and completely relatable, it reflects the awkwardness of being in love under the gaze of a society that sees desire as shameful.
Kasri doesn’t see the film as an act of resistance. He had no trouble getting permits, and the film screened at a festival where it was warmly received. But even he admitted to feeling nervous— not because of the authorities, but because of the actors. And that fear is revealing. To him, the tone was everything. Comedy wasn’t a mask— it was a lens. It allowed him to explore intimacy and vulnerability without confronting the audience too directly. The kiss became a metaphor, the body became a symbol, love remained present, but only half-spoken, half-shown. “It was important to talk about our society through the prism of comedy,” he told me.
I know this frustration. Many of us feel the ache of not seeing love on screen. The absence of tenderness, especially in the places we go to dream. Cinema should be a refuge, a space for longing and softness, but often, it forgets to make room for exactly just that.
Maybe our cinema was too busy documenting wounds: the legacy of colonialism, war, economic struggle. Maybe we needed to tell those stories first. But what if love is part of that process too? To show love, to speak it, to film it, should not be a luxury. It is a form of resistance. It challenges a world that wants bodies controlled, emotions managed, tenderness hidden. What we choose to censor reveals what we most fear. And it is time for things to change, once and for all.
This piece was initially commissioned as part of a collaboration between MILLE WORLD and Kalam Aflam.
