‘The Arab’ Director on Moving From Docs to Fiction for the Story of an Unnamed Figure in Albert Camus’ ‘The Stranger’: Rotterdam

Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger (L’étranger) recently got a cinema adaptation, under the same title, by French director François Ozon, which is part of the lineup of the 55th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). But another film related to the Camus classic world premiered in the Big Screen Competition of the festival on Saturday night: The Arab, the fiction feature debut by documentary maker Malek Bensmaïl (Checks and Balances, Alienations, The Battle of Algiers, a Film Within History).

The movie, directed by the filmmaker and written by him and Jacques Fieschi, reframes an unnamed figure from the book, a murdered man who is simply referred to as The Arab throughout the novel. In the film, his name is Moussa, and his story is told through the testimony of his aging brother Haroun to a journalist, making the film an exploration of memory, identity, and colonialism, given…