The City in Early Alternative Arab Cinema

“We don’t know how to make cities for our bodies and our children’s bodies. When I say body, I mean a moving body, not a static one. If cities don’t resemble you, you become lost.” So says Lebanese film director Borhane Alaouie in a 2007 interview. Indeed, Alaouie’s film work as a whole can be read as an ongoing exploration of the relationship between characters and place, beginning with his 1974 masterpiece Kafr Kassem, in which a Syrian village is explicitly credited with playing the role of the eponymous Palestinian village; encompassing his 1978 documentary film It Is Not Enough That God Is with the Poor, about the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathi and his drive to discover a specifically Arab architecture suitable to the postcolonial context in which he worked; and extending to his fictional films set in Lebanon. Alaouie’s statement also applies to the works of a number of other Arab filmmakers from the late 1960s to the present who have used explorations of individuals and their urban environments to address questions of identity and subjectivity and their relationship to history and community.