Following the successful formula of his well-known docu on black African cinema, Caméra d’Afrique, Férid Boughedir has put together a fast-moving, enlightening hour of clips from key Arab films of the last 20 years. An hour format is too brief to do much more than touch base on the top pictures and directors, but it provides a solid introduction for those interested in an overview … Egyptian production was long the only cinema made in the Arab countries, with its popular genres and entertainment pictures. Since the late 1920s, it has commercially dominated the Arab world. Only in the 1960s, when the North African countries gained independence, did other films emerge with new themes and aims. Caméra arabe presents highlights from a number of them, including works by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, Abdellatif Ben Ammar, Merzak Allouache, Souheil Ben-Barka, Mohamed Malas and Nouri Bouzid. A special place is reserved for Egyptian helmer Youssef Chahine. Chahine’s intelligent, anguished battle to describe Arabs’ shaken sense of their own identity in a world rocked by dramatic political events rather sums up the film. Boughedir suggests the 1967 war with Israel, President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, and the war in Lebanon are events that have unmanned the Arab intellectually as film traces the political themes in recent film production. At the same time, capsule interviews with the major directors show a broad range of thinking on the possibility of putting political messages into films. Boughedir takes up the cause of Bouzid’s controversial Man of Ashes, described as the first film to show friendship between an Arab youth and an old Jew. Bouzid himself touches on another sensitive issue when he says each film should push back censorship a bit more.

Anthony Yung, “Variety”, 20 May 1987