This paper aims to assess the different ways in which families of Maghrebi origin are represented in contemporary French cinema. It is generally recognised that there have been significant transformations in the composition of the Western family in the second half of the twentieth century, ranging from single parent families to those with multiple, gay and/or non-biological parents (cf Rudinesco: La Famille en désordre). Explorations of the effects of such transformations have been a feature of new French cinema of the 1990s (cf Prédal: Le Jeune cinéma français). In contrast the immigrant Maghrebi family is perceived as problematic because it is resistant to change (cf. Guéunif Souilamas: Des ”beurettes” aux descendantes d’immigrants nord-africains). Films centring on the beurs (young people of Maghrebi origin) repeatedly construct the Maghrebi family as a site of conflict, different from its Western counterpart because of generational and gendered divisions between parents wedded to traditional patriarchal Arabo-Berber-Islamic values and young people seeking to locate themselves in relation to Western culture as well as (or rather than) their parents’ culture of origin. This paper reviews and analyses representations of the family in the corpus of films by and/or about second generation Maghrebi immigrants, focusing in the first instance on Chaos (Coline Serreau, 2001) and Drôle de Félix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000), films which propose apparently progressive representations of inter-ethnic feminist and gay alternatives to both the Western and the Maghrebi family. However, the paper argues that the construction of new families/ communities in these two films is achieved only by the demonisation (in Chaos) or evacuation (in Drôle de Félix) of the Maghrebi family. It contrasts these representations of the family with those in films by directors of Maghrebi origin which either directly address contemporary contradictions in the situation of the immigrant Maghrebi family or attempt to rehabilitate the parents’ generation through films set in the past. The paper analyses the extent to which these films destabilise fixed, Eurocentric perspectives on the Maghrebi family, and suggests in conclusion that, unlike Chaos and Drôle de Félix, they may be able to confound stereotypical or essentialist representations of the family through their attention to the specificity of the postcolonial socio-economic context of immigration and settlement in France and their incorporation of a plurality of voices emanating from within the immigrant family.