The Stranger

Mm.

Genre driven, but, you know, like, uh, like Camus' L'Étranger, which you probably-

Yes

... read in French.

I'm really excited.

is directed by Malik Ben-Smail and this is sort of like because I mentioned earlier that I kind of got my start in like literature it's kind of impossible to not be an English major or like you know not even just English major but like like loving books and not know The Stranger by Albert Camus and this film is sort of like a decolonized like other perspective like story around this book that is so famous and it's been kind of considered canon literature like for many many years and it kind of like talks about or focuses on like the character the Arab that in the book is unnamed and it's sort of like just it was killed within the first little bit of the book and this is a story about like the Arab's brother telling telling you know that that like oh this character had a name and it was you know like a person and you know i don't know it's it's a very very interesting perspective and uh yeah it's a film from algeria um which is exciting to have um a film from algeria you know some countries like you don't see like every year like something that kind of like is making the festival circuit like making the festival round so It's exciting when a country that you haven't seen in a while has a film that the people are excited about.

Those are two that I really love.

I love the other side of your question, though, that is like, what film am I excited to watch with people? I think I...

He's been doing everything he can to show that he's learned his lesson.

He even wrote the judge a six-page letter that referenced Albert Camus' The Stranger and The Talmud.

But it's not just Sam writing letters.

He also rallies more than 120 of his friends and family members to do the same.

... y-yourself.

So i-i- you know, in The Stranger, which is about, um, the natural world, it's about, um, violence, truth, um, the, the, the, the way people don't want the truth.

In a strange way, when I first read that I was only 12 years old.

I picked it out.

I mean, again, relative to Camus, I think Camus as writer... still completely lives.

People read L'Etranger all the time.

I don't know what it sells every year, but I bet it's a hell of a lot.

At a certain age, you're going to read that book.

Wow.

I was like, you know what? If anyone's going to speak to this movie, Camus, who wrote The Stranger, which is kind of an absurdist look at life and living and what it means to even be alive.

So, yeah, I was like, man, that's hardcore, but also true.

Yeah.

Albert Camus said, was not the poster child for positive thinking.

He was a novelist whose two most popular works were The Stranger and The Plague.

But Camus is a perfect example of my message today, the resilience way.

The resilience way.

the novel by Diderot.

Uh, yeah, like Camus's The Stranger, um-

Oh, same here.

Like the existentialists got me into it.

Comics and Westerns and, uh...

And then in the school library, I saw a very thin volume which I thought, um, I was capable of reading, and I picked it out, and it was actually, um, Camus' The Stranger.

And I started this book, someone who'd only ever read Westerns and war comics and, and I was enchanted.

Um, and although I understood none of it, I understood that world of, um, heat and the beach, the natural world, and the unexpected pointless violence.