Arab filmmakers and critics coined the term “alternative cinema” (al-sinima al-badilah) at a symposium held during the First International Young Filmmakers Festival in 1972. Alternative cinema would encompass regional film movements and projects that challenged the hegemony of commercial cinema, supported new forms of cinematic engagement, served progressive political movements, and encouraged experimentation and personal expression. Participants at the gathering believed that a regional Arab film movement could provide space for personal and political expression that national contexts did not permit, and that a robust Arab cinema would serve as a bridge towards a global third world cinema movement. Alternative cinema would be radical and inclusive, and would continually strive to define its own parameters and articulate a utopian vision for what cinema should be and do. By examining the films of early alternative Arab cinema for how they represent the Arab city, one can trace conceptual and aesthetic trends shared by filmmakers across the region. “City” films also lend themselves to considerations of history, modernization, postcolonialism that are shared across the region in particularly useful ways. While the films analyzed in this paper are very much focused on specific social, political, and environmental concerns, the cities that are represented within them share a history that shapes these filmmaker’s works. A focus on that aspect of their work adds depth to our understanding of the films themselves and may even reshape our understanding of Arab cinema of the 1970s. Specifically, in this paper I examine films Retour a Agadir by Mohamed Afifi (about Agadir), Omar Gatlato by Merzka Allouche (about Algiers), and Beirut the Encounter by Borhane Alaouie (about Beirut). In each of these works filmmakers deploy film structure, a complex sound track, and the movement of figures through space to illuminate particular aspects of how space is dialectically produced through the interplay of perception, conception, and the rhythms of lived experience (LeFebve),