Merzak Allouache

Front Row (2026)

Up bright and early with their pet in tow, Zohra Bouderbala and her five children are heading to the beach. This is not a drill! In Algiers, the coveted front row spot waits for no one, but it's not this family's first time having to beat the summer seasid ...

Des femmes (2020)

As the peaceful and determined Hirak movement gathers momentum and hopes for profound political change sweep across Algeria, women are combining femininity and feminism in the past, present, and future. ...

Autumn Landscapes (2019)

Mostaganem, 2019. In a few weeks, five teenage girls are found dead on the beach. The bodies all bear the same marks of violence. How to explain these serial murders? Mobilizing her informers and a cop friend, Houria, a seasoned journalist, leads the inves ...

Divine Wind (2018)

A young man and woman form an intense bond when they are assigned to launch an armed action against an oil-refinery in the North African desert. ...

Investigating Paradise (2018)

Young Algerian journalist Nedjma is investigating Islamic accounts of paradise. She is particularly interested in the descriptions used by Salafi preachers to recruit young Algerian men as jihadists. She and her colleague Mustapha find a number of disturbi ...

Madame Courage (2015)

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 invincibilit ...

The Rooftops (2013)

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

The Repentant (2013)

Algeria region of the high flatlands. As Islamist groups continue to spread terror, Rashid, a young Jihadist, leaves the mountains to return to his village. In keeping with the law « of pardon and national harmony », he has to surrender to the police and ...

Tata Bakhta (2012)

Bay of Algiers (2012)

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 ...

Normal! (2012)

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 man who ...

Harragas (2009)

Set in the northern Algerian port city of Mostaganem. The title refers to the hordes of refugees, the 'Harragas', who smuggle themselves out of the country via any means possible. Here we meet one such group, Rachid, Nasser and Imene who pay a smuggler, Ha ...

Bab El Web (2005)

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 over th ...

Chouchou (2003)

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 meets ...

The Other World (2001)

Yasmine and Rachid, two young Parisians children of Algerian immigrants, are in love and live a quiet life in France. One day, Rachid disappears and Yasmine learns that he is in Algeria. She decides to follow him, in that country that she does not know, th ...

À bicyclette (2001)

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. ...

La soledad del manager (1999)

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 behin ...

Algiers-Beirut: A Souvenir (1998)

A female journalist becomes re-acquainted with an Algerian ex- colleague when she visits Beirut, and begins an affair with him. ...

Love Reinvented (1997)

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 to be ...

Salut cousin ! (1996)

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 suitcas ...

Lumière & Company (1995)

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, (2) ...

Bab El Oued City (1994)

Bab El-Oued, a popular district of Algiers, in 1989, a few months after the riots. Boualem works at night in a bakery and steals the loudspeaker that was installed on his roof and was broadcasting the Imam's word... therefore preventing him from sleeping. ...

Women on the Move (1990)

Directed by Merzak Allouache. ...

After October (1989)

Directed by Merzak Allouache. ...

A Parisian Love Story (1987)

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! ...

The Man Who Was Looking at the Windows (1985)

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 quest ...

The Adventures of a Hero (1979)

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 eagerly a ...

Omar Gatlato (1976)

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. ...

Wind from the South (1975)

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 decides ...

The Thief (1967)

One of Merzak Allouache's graduation films. ...

Intimate Thought (1967)

One of Merzak Allouache's graduation films. ...

Le Passeur immobile (2021)

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 like ...

Planet Malek (2019)

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 Wave i ...

My Story Is Not Yet Written (2017)

Jacqueline Gozlan - who left Algeria with her parents in 1961 - nostalgically retraces the history of the Algiers Cinematheque, inseparable from that of the country's Independence, through film extracts and numerous testimonies; notably that of one of its ...

Cinématon XIII (1981)

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