My dissertation analyses in depth how social, ethnic, religious, and sexual stereotypes of suburban and immigrants citizens of France are contested by movies set in the French banlieue. My analysis builds on the theories of performative encounters of Mireille Rosello, as well as Guy Debord's notion of détournement, in order to examine the aesthetics of French and francophone beur and banlieue filmmaking. Through film and textual analysis, I focus on representations of specific roles of the suburban dwellers in the works of the Algerian born filmmakers Mahmoud Zemmouri and Rabah Ameur- Zaïmeche, the French filmmakers Jean-François Richet, Gaël Morel, Fabrice Genestal, Nils and Bertrand Tavernier and the writer François Maspero. The scope of this inquiry—major and underground filmmakers from both sides of the Mediterrannean and across the last two decades of French and beur filmmaking—allows me to develop a global theory of the aesthetics of détournement (or hijacking) of urban stereotypes. As these filmmakers reformulate stereotypes, they inject into the imaginary new situations in which the subaltern plays unexpected roles. Although these French and beur filmmakers give life to very different characters, their use of détournement and hybrid genres enables a strategy of empowerment of the subaltern that is consistent across these narrations. These works provide a new model of multicultural French society that is neither strictly based on the communitarian Anglosaxon model, nor the French republican model, but on a néo-communautarisme métissant. Thus, understanding this aesthetic becomes a significant interpretive tool for reading both French society in the 21^st century and its cinematic representation.