The Arab

Malek Bensmail’s fiction debut reframes the unnamed figure from Albert Camus’ L’étranger through the testimony of his ageing brother. Moving between memory, imagination and historical record, it offers a sharp reflection on identity, storytelling and the ways nations remember their past.

Meursault (no given name) sits on death row, awaiting execution for the murder of a man whose name he does not know – a name never mentioned in Albert Camus’ 1942 debut L’étranger, one of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century (and newly adapted by François Ozon, also screening at IFFR this year). But who was “the Arab”, as he is referred to throughout the book? In 2013, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud offered an answer in Meursault, contre-enquête, a novel that reopens the case from the other side. Malek Bensmail, long known for his documentary work, now adapts Daoud’s text in his first fiction feature.

Here, the man’s name is Moussa, as his brother Haroun reveals to a journalist half a century after the killing, during a long night in a restaurant-bar in Oran. Haroun recounts their version of what happened on that fateful day, and how the event reshaped his own life and that of their mother. What begins as an act of revelation subtly transforms into a stylish, classically composed murder mystery, one in which Haroun’s testimony opens as many questions as it resolves.

– Vanja Kaludjercic

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