At first glance, it might seem that documentary films, by their very nature, could provide a closer, more accurate, or less-manipulated glimpse of Muslim women from the Maghreb in France than other artistic forms, given that ‘real’ women are actually seen and heard in them. One might also assume that the voices of the women reach spectators without being framed or filtered in a manner comparable to that in feature films, where for example, the women's voices are fictional, part of screenplays, and relayed by actresses. As Patricia Aufderheide reminds us, however, documentaries ‘are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose’ (2007, 2). Thus while documentaries do capture moments in the lives of ‘real’ people, as opposed to the performances of actors, this does not diminish the fact that they are constructed, at least to a certain extent, through processes of production, mise-en-scène, and montage (editing), among others, which are seldom controlled by the people who are featured in the documentaries. Indeed, the very definition of the word montage in French foregrounds the intention behind the action: ‘The act of putting together, using specific techniques, elements of diverse origins (texts, sounds, images, photos, etc.) in order to achieve a particular effect, the end result’ (‘Montage’, def. 3 in the Larousse dictionary; my emphasis). This ‘particular effect’ is akin to what film scholar Bill Nichols has termed the ‘voice’ in documentary film, which is produced though the interaction of different codes: