Movies: Merzak Allouache

Choukri, alias Chouchou, a transvestite Maghrebi with clear eyes, comes illegally to Paris to find his nephew. Hired as an assistant by a psychotherapist, known for his good mood, he also work as a waiter in a transvestite cabaret of Clichy where he ...

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds,...

Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are...

Omar, a young man, lives a simple life with his family and suffers from loneliness. His life changes when he tries to bond with a girl he barely knows....

In one of the tribes of the Algerian Sahara, everyone awaits the arrival of the hero who will defend the rights of the poor. A man decides one day to put the mark of the "hero" on his newborn son and the whole tribe celebrates the arrival of this eag...

The writer Louis Gardel remembers his youth in Algeria. In 1955, Louis is 15 years old and lives with his grandmother Zoé. Zoé is friend with president Steiger, leader of the French settlers but also with the old Arab Bouarab. One night looking at...

The comedy in this lively film barely conceals its darker, more serious undertones as it chronicles a young Algerian's eye-opening introduction to the joys and travails of being an immigrant in Paris. Alilo has left his home to pick up an important s...

A sprawling, masterful depiction of a day in the life of Algiers by arguably Algeria’s greatest living filmmaker, Merzak Allouache....

Carvalho is investigating the murder of a man by a prostitute, according to the job the man's wife has given him. But he cannot imagine that the issue goes far beyond and is at a much bigger scale than anyone may think. There is a large multinational...

Different aspects of homosexual romance are explored in this compendium of ten short vignettes encompassing a broad look at AIDS and range for the tale of a lesbian teen trying to come out to her parents, to a gay man who shocks his lover by claiming...

A police office in Algiers sometime after independence. Mr Rachid, father, around fifty years old, former colonial official transferred to the cinema annex library. Mr. Rachid, disappointed and exasperated by his sad life, faced with an inspector who...

Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series....

During the winter of 1995, while a transport strike paralyses the Ile de France, Anne and Patrice go to work by bicycle. Their meeting at a traffic light will change their lives....

Ahmed Malek’s name might have been forgotten by his fellow Algerians but his timeless tunes certainly haven’t. Called the Ennio Morricone of Algiers, he composed music for more than 200 movies, amongst which the most famous films of the Algerian New ...

After the December riots and the first peaceful marches in Algeria, while the Arab Spring begins in Tunisia and Egypt, Fouzi wants to gather his actors to show them the unfinished editing of the film he made two years ago on the illusion of a young m...

A very unusual love story indeed the one that unites for a while Marie, a young French woman born in Algier, whose dream is becoming a top model and Ali, an Algerian from Clichy, recently released from prison, who hopes to become ... an astronaut!...

Kamel and his brother Bouzid live in Bab el Oued, a working-class neighborhood in Algiers. Kamel is a loner, disillusioned and taciturn. Bouzid, more jovial, is an Internet enthusiast. He spends his time in a cybercafé chatting with girls from all ov...

Omar, an unstable and lonely teenager, lives in a slum in the suburbs of Mostaganem, Algeria. He is addicted to a famous psychotropic, nicknamed “Madame Courage”: Artane tablets, very popular among young Algerians, for their euphoric effect of invinc...

Néfissa, a student in Algiers, returns to her village in the south in the summer. Her father wants her to marry the mayor but she wants to continue her studies. Confronting her father and the opinion of the villagers who do not understand her, she de...

Directed by Merzak Allouache....