“L’Arabe,” the first fiction film by director Malek Bensmaïl, draws on Kamel Daoud’s novel “The Meursault Investigation” to revisit the story of the unnamed Arab killed by Meursault in Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.”
Daoud’s novel gives the victim a name: Moussa Ouled El-Assasse. It also makes his younger brother, Haroun, the narrator, offering a counterpart to Camus’s novel and restoring a perspective absent from the original account.
The film is set in Algeria in the 1990s, where a young journalist meets an older man. The story frames that encounter against a period marked by Islamist terrorism and explores the legacy of a painful, contested memory.
Sources: Le Monde Culture.