This paper focuses on the circulation of long-feature films by women filmmakers produced with Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian funding, a purposefully small corpus of about 50 films produced over 35 years that raises questions of gender, the national, but also the regional (Maghrebi) and the transnational, each of these being raised in specific terms in different locations at different times. The apparently growing access to filmmaking for women directors is concomitant with the parallel decay of commercial film exhibition in most parts of the world, or its re-configuration.

The objective of this enquiry is to reflect on what we know and what we don’t know about the ways in which the films have been watched recently, the categories that are relevant to accounting for the ways in which viewers gain access to, watch and give meaning to films (in particular the relevance of gender, the national, and the terms within which the country of origin gets constructed, when it does, but also the regional and the transnational) at a time when the institutions have lost control over much of the circulation.