Women, National Liberation, and Melodrama in Arab Countries

Abstract

In spite of a long tradition, melodrama has today practically disappeared from the screens of the Arab world, though still alive in TV serials and in some rudimentary elements of Egyptian mainstream cinema. Melodrama is one of the film genres which in Western film criticism has been associated  mostly with women. In Arab cinema it was one of the first film genres to take root. Unlike Arab realism which became highly evaluated as "a touchstone of cultural worth'" and expressed overtly anti-colonial, socialist and modernist views particularly in the time shortly following national independence , melodrama was ghettoized as trivial and escapist.