As the name implies, téléfilms – often referred to as fictions unitaires or unitaires de 90 minutes in France – are fiction films made specifically to be broadcast on the petit écran, whereas feature-length films are destined for distribution on the grand écran, in cinemas. Although this cinematic form is often considered to be worthy of limited critical attention on the grounds that téléfilms are intended to attracted broad, ‘popular’ television audiences, they merit attention precisely because they are frequently seen by much larger audiences than art-house movies and thus have the potential to significantly impact viewers’ understandings of Maghrebi migrant women and their families in France. As such, they can also serve to counter – or reinforce – dominant media representations about this population. In her monograph Far-flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema, Daniela Berghahn argues that:

This chapter will consider the depictions of first-generation women from the Maghreb in France in téléfilms, and in particular the extent to which they portray the women as asserting agency and crossing barriers. The aim of this analysis is to gauge whether these films, which have the potential to reach large mainstream audiences in France, challenge the perception that Muslim women from the Maghreb are silent and passive victims by according them some form of agency in their respective narratives. The idea of agency is to be understood both in the sense of ‘acting’ (as in the French verb agir – from the Latin agere) or ‘doing’, and ‘speaking out’.