The Arab: we are remaking history (critique)

By freely adapting Kamel Daoud’s Meursault Counter-Inquiry, a postcolonial rewriting of Camus’s The Stranger, Malek Bensmail talentedly recounts the wounds of an Algeria marked by the wounds of its own history.

At the end of his adaptation of The Stranger, François Ozon discreetly gave a name to the one the novel designates as “the Arab”. This name, engraved on the stele of a tomb, is that of Moussa Hamdani. It is inspired by the one imagined by Kamel Daoud in Meursault, contre-investigation (2014), a late but salutary response toAlbert Camus. It took less time for the Algerian Malek Bensmaïl — a big name in documentary making his first fiction here — to respond to Ozon, from whom he also borrows a beautiful black and white for a few sequences. This “Arab” is therefore a counter-history which originates in Algeria during the dark years. A journalist in the hot seat listens to Moussa Hamdani’s story, told by his brother.