In 1972 Damascus hosted the First Festival for the Cinema of Young Filmmakers. In meetings during the festival itself and a follow up symposium in Beirut, filmmakers and critics from ten Arab states attempted to lay the groundwork for a new, alternative Arab cinema, one that would be independent of both commercial and narrow state national interests and encourage experimentation and innovation. This new cinema would be socially responsible and creative. It would engage with new practices and theories surrounding aesthetics, mediation and the gaze that were arising around the globe at that time. At the same time, it would create a distinctly Arab cinematic language such that the new films that would emerge from this movement would be more than mere copies of practices developed elsewhere. The 1972 festival came on the heels of declarations by young cineastes of new cinema movements within Egyptian and Algerian cinema industries. The cultural periodical Al-Hilal had already devoted an issue to the concept of “new cinema” in 1969. The festival itself led two journals, Al-ma`rifah in Syria and Al-Tariq in Lebanon to devote entire issues to the concept of alternative Arab cinema. New journals devoted to film as a serious art form rather than as popular entertainment were also launched in Syria and Lebanon at this time. In summarizing the achievements of alternative Arab cinema at the end of the decade, the Lebanese film critic Walid Shumayt could point to a number of independent filmmakers and thoughtful, innovative works that had been produced in a variety of contexts: public sector cinema, co-productions, newly emerging commercial enterprises, and film collectives. However, alternative Arab cinema never developed as an organized movement. This paper explores the context and conditions of the 1972 conference and its aftermath to explain what was at stake in creating such a film movement, why it failed to coalesce, and the implications of both the attempt and failure to create it had on the development of cinema in the Arab world in the ensuing decades.