[6] Returning to Algeria, he spent a few months at the Algerian News Office and then was dismissed, along with his colleagues from the Institute for Cinema’s graduating class after a petition demanding more responsibility for the workers.

To calm the protest, the group of alumni of the Institute for Cinema including Allouache was sent to France for a three-month internship at the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF).

He remained in France for several years and enrolled at the École pratique des hautes études with Marc Ferro and took the course "Analysis of 20th century film documents".

[5] He directed a documentary film about this work called Nous et la révolution agraire (Us and the Agrarian Revolution) in 1972.

[7] He gained international fame in 1977 by directing his first feature film Omar Gatlato (1976), which takes a cynical but realistic look at the alienation of men in Algerian society, which was selected at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes and won a Silver Medal at the Moscow Film Festival.

[8] Then he directed Les Aventures d'un héros in 1978, a film about an Algerian father who falsely labels his infant son as the hero his tribe has been waiting for, which received the Thanit d'or at the Carthage Film Festival, and directed L'Homme qui regardait les fenêtres in 1982.

Allouache returned to France and wrote a screenplay for TF1, Parlez après le signal sonore, and, in 1987, directed a feature film Un amour à Paris, a love story about two Algerians: a model and an ex-con, screened in the Perspectives of French Cinema section at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Perspectives of French Cinema Prize.

[5] In 1989, he directed a satirical program for Algerian television, La Boîte à chique, and then joined the National Audiovisual Council, a structure in charge of reforming cinematography when the Ministry of Culture was dissolved.

In 2003, he directed Chouchou, starring Gad Elmaleh, about a Maghrebi transgender woman who settles in Paris to find her nephew.

[5] In 2009, Allouache wrote and directed the film Harragas, the story of young Algerian refugees who fled their home country on small boats into the Mediterranean.