Speaking in 1989, after the initial promise of Beur Cinema appeared to have reached an impasse, Algerian émigré director Abdelkrim Bahloul summarised the situation facing filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in France:

The position arguably remained much the same for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers during the 1990s. Whilst the decade was marked by the emergence of a number of important new voices in Maghrebi-French filmmaking (from grassroots directors such as Malik Chibane and Zaïda Ghorab-Volta to those with mainstream aspirations such as Djamel Bensalah and actor Jamel Debbouze), the number of features directed by filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in the 1990s was still extremely small. Moreover, those films that did emerge during this period were almost all either comedies or social realist narratives depicting issues such as immigration, integration and social exclusion from the perspective of North African immigrants and their French-born descendants. In short, they remained for the most part trapped within the essentialist categories of beur and banlieue filmmaking that had become over-determined from without.