This is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, "cinéma beur" (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and "cinéma de banlieue" (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates). Carrie Tarr's insightful account draws on a wide range of films, from directors such as Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassowitz and Djamel Bensalah. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that these films challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture, addressing issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French.