Personal Info
Birth date
1944-10-06 (80 Years)
Gender
Male
Known for
Directing
Place of birth
Alger, Algérie
Also known as
Abderrazak Allouache
مرزاق علواش
Merzak Allouache
Biography
Merzak Allouache (born 6 October 1944) is an Algerian film director and screenwriter. His 1976 film Omar Gatlato was later entered into the 10th Moscow International Film Festival where it won the Silver Prize. His 1996 Salut cousin! was submitted to the 69th Academy Awards in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. He is one of the most influential Algerian filmmakers, considered by some to be the most important. He is the only Algerian filmmaker who devoted most, if not all, of his cinematic work to his native country.
Filmography
Love Reinvented
NYR
Overview:
A series of shorts about the AIDS crisis, homosexuality, and the reinvention of love in such conditions.
Chouchou
5.271
Overview:
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 Stanislas.
Lumière & Company
6.276
Overview:
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) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.
Love Reinvented
5
Overview:
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 pregnant, to another man's reminiscence of a brief affair with an HIV-positive man.
Bab El Oued City
6
Overview:
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. This blunder is taken as a pretext by the Islamists to put the district under their control...
Bay of Algiers
3.9
Overview:
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 Bay of Algiers, Louis is convinced that the world in which he has grown will disappear. The first events of the War of Independence have begun. The young boys and young girls have a good time at the seaside: swimming, dancing, flirting. But, little by little, the war becomes part of their daily life.
La soledad del manager
NYR
Overview:
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 behind all the deaths that happen while the investigation is taking place, and economic interests will put Carvalho and his friends in danger.
Harragas
7
Overview:
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, Hassan, to take them to Spain in his rickety boat. Along with a group of African and Arab migrants, they are risking all they have to cross the stormy Straits.
Le Passeur immobile
NYR
Overview:
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 a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.
The Man Who Was Looking at the Windows
10
Overview:
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 questions him, tries to explain: why did he kill his former department head after a long night of wandering?
Salut cousin !
4.2
Overview:
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 suitcase for his employer. Unfortunately, he has lost the Parisian address. Fortunately, his cousin Mok, emigrated there several years before with his middle-class family before and is able to act as a guide. Mok, an aspiring rap singer, comes from a middle-class family, but chooses to live on his own in the dilapidated deteriorating 18th district, known as 'Moskova.' Mok characterizes the place as a haven for artists and intellectuals, but it is plainly just a Third World slum filled with tightly knit and colorful neighbors. Mok and Alilo have many interesting, some tragedy-tinged adventures over the five days it takes them to find the suitcase.
Bab El Web
5.3
Overview:
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 the world. Without really believing it, he invites them to Algiers. But one day, Laurence, one of his French correspondents, tells him that she accepts his invitation.
Front Row
NYR
Overview:
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 seaside crowds. The unmotivated and out-of-luck masses who arrive too late will be left to a viewless laze in the sun, the alleged horizon blocked by a fortress of parasols and flowing canopies.
My Story Is Not Yet Written
10
Overview:
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 creators, Jean-Michel Arnold, but also of filmmakers such as Merzak Allouache and critics such as Jean Douchet. A place of life for Algerians, the Cinémathèque was the hub of African cinemas. Created in 1965 by Ahmed Hocine, Mahieddine Moussaoui and Jean-Michel Arnold, the Cinémathèque benefited from the excitement of Independence. The Cinematheque becomes a meeting place for Algiers society, future filmmakers find their best school there. In 1969, the Algiers Pan-African Festival brought together all African filmmakers, and from 1970, Boudjemâa Kareche developed a collection of Arab and African films.
Omar Gatlato
6.3
Overview:
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.
À bicyclette
NYR
Overview:
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.
The Rooftops
4.2
Overview:
A sprawling, masterful depiction of a day in the life of Algiers by arguably Algeria’s greatest living filmmaker, Merzak Allouache.
The Repentant
6.4
Overview:
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 give up his weapon. He thus receives amnesty and becomes a « repenti ». But the law cannot erase his crimes and for Rachid it's the beginning of a one-way journey of violence, secrets and manipulation.
Autumn Landscapes
7.5
Overview:
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 investigation. And despite the pressure to give up, the young woman is pugnacious. But the decision to continue her investigation at all costs will not be without consequences.
Planet Malek
10
Overview:
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 in the 70s and the 80s can be found. Paloma Colombe, a DJ, digger and documentary director, went to Algiers to meet his daughter, friends and former coworkers. Images of the city by night offer a perfect background to Ahmed Malek’s music. Globetrotter, pioneer of electronic music and of the concept of the home studio, he created a unique sound that truly goes beyond genres and countries.
A Parisian Love Story
10
Overview:
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 Other World
4
Overview:
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, that is filled with violence. As she travels looking for Rachid, she falls deeper into the horror of a country where nothing seems normal, another world, where death is ever present.
The Adventures of a Hero
10
Overview:
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 awaited messiah who came to save them. This false hero then grows up by assuming his role of savior. Filled with cynicism, he crosses the countryside and has a number of adventures.Algiers-Beirut: A Souvenir
NYR
Overview:
A female journalist becomes re-acquainted with an Algerian ex- colleague when she visits Beirut, and begins an affair with him.
Wind from the South
10
Overview:
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 to flee to Algiers. The shepherd Rabah discovering her wounded and lost in the mountains, has her treated by her mother. In contact with Nefissa, Rabat becomes aware of his exploited condition and discovers the possibilities offered to him by the cooperatives of the agrarian revolution. The two young people will go through the decisive stage together which will allow them to escape obscurantism and exploitation. Based on the novel "Le vent du sud" by Abdelhamid Benahouga
Investigating Paradise
6.2
Overview:
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 disturbing, richly embellished video sermons and decide to explore the phenomenon in more detail.Madame Courage
5.7
Overview:
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 invincibility. Omar is an expert thief. One morning, he goes downtown to commit his usual crimes. His first prey is a young girl called Selma, walking with her friends, prominently wearing a gold necklace. As he commits his larceny, their eyes meet.Acting
2021Le Passeur immobile as Self
2019Planet Malek as Self -Director
2017My Story Is Not Yet Written as Self
1981Cinématon XIII as N°128
Directing
2024Front Row ... Director
2020Des femmes ... Director
2019Autumn Landscapes ... Director
2018Divine Wind ... Director
2018Investigating Paradise ... Director
2015Madame Courage ... Director
2013The Rooftops ... Director
2013The Repentant ... Director
2012Tata Bakhta ... Director
2012Bay of Algiers ... Director
2012Normal! ... Director
2009Harragas ... Director
2005Bab El Web ... Director
2003Chouchou ... Director
2001The Other World ... Director
2001À bicyclette ... Director
1999La soledad del manager ... Director
1998Algiers-Beirut: A Souvenir ... Director
1997Love Reinvented ... Director
1996Love Reinvented (1 Episode) ... Director
1996Salut cousin ! ... Director
1995Lumière & Company ... Director
1994Bab El Oued City ... Director
1990Women on the Move ... Director
1989After October ... Director
1987A Parisian Love Story ... Director
1985The Man Who Was Looking at the Windows ... Director
1979The Adventures of a Hero ... Director
1976Omar Gatlato ... Director
1975Wind from the South ... Assistant Director
1967Intimate Thought ... Director
1967The Thief ... Director
Editing
2024Front Row ... Editor
Production
2024Front Row ... Producer
2018Investigating Paradise ... Producer
2013The Rooftops ... Producer
Writing
2024Front Row ... Writer
2019Autumn Landscapes ... Writer
2018Divine Wind ... Writer
2018Investigating Paradise ... Screenplay
2013The Rooftops ... Scenario Writer
2013The Repentant ... Writer
2012Bay of Algiers ... Writer
2009Harragas ... Writer
2005Bab El Web ... Writer
2003Chouchou ... Scenario Writer
2001À bicyclette ... Scenario Writer
1996Salut cousin ! ... Writer
1994Bab El Oued City ... Writer
1979The Adventures of a Hero ... Writer
1976Omar Gatlato ... Screenplay