There is no shortage of documentaries about Syria. But how do you make the history of a conflict understandable to those who have only ever encountered it from the outside?
Making its MENA premiere at AIFF, Birds of War answers through intimacy. Directed by Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and Syrian photographer Abd Alkader Habak, the film follows a relationship unfolding across more than a decade of revolution, war, and exile. By grounding political upheaval in the love story of two people, it offers audiences who have never lived through conflict a way into its emotional and human reality.
Iraq
Some debut features arrive so fully formed that it is difficult to believe they are a filmmaker’s first. Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake is one of them.
Set in sanctions-era Iraq, the film follows nine-year-old Lamiaa as she is sent on an impossible mission to find the ingredients for Saddam Hussein’s birthday cake. Through the unfiltered eyes of a child, a seemingly small task exposes the absurdity of a country being ordered to celebrate while its people struggle to survive.
Hadi’s recreation of 1990s Iraq feels less researched than remembered. Shot on location with nonprofessional actors, the film carries the textures, gestures, and exhaustion of a period he lived through himself. Lamiaa does not understand dictatorship, international sanctions, or the forces that have emptied the shops around her. She knows only that the cake must be made and that the president’s smiling portrait is everywhere.
Winner of both the Caméra d’Or and the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at Cannes, The President’s Cake restores a human face to a history too often reduced to policies and statistics. It does not need speeches to become political. By following one child searching for eggs, flour, and sugar, it reveals the cruelty of an entire era.
Tunisia
With Tunisia taking centre stage in this year’s AIFF Spotlight, one of the country’s most exciting new films is also competing in the festival’s main programme.
Amel Guellaty’s debut feature, Where the Wind Comes From, follows Alyssa and Mehdi, two young Tunisians who set off on a road trip to Djerba after she secretly enters him into an art competition whose prize could offer them a way out.
What begins as a modest journey gradually becomes a portrait of a generation raised on the promises of the Arab Spring and left to navigate its disappointments. Guellaty moves between realism and fantasy, bringing Alyssa’s daydreams and Mehdi’s drawings to life while grounding the film in the pressures shaping contemporary Tunisia: unemployment, migration, family responsibility, and the difficulty of imagining a future as an artist.
At its heart, however, Where the Wind Comes From is a tender story of friendship. Eya Bellagha’s restless, impulsive Alyssa and Slim Baccar’s quieter Mehdi share an easy chemistry, revealing two different ways of surviving the same reality. As part of AIFF’s wider celebration of Tunisian cinema, the film feels like an especially fitting introduction to one of the country’s most promising new voices.
Lebanon
Few films at this year’s festival have us as intrigued as Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me. Constructed from decades of archival footage, home videos, and television broadcasts, the film creates a portrait of Lebanon through the images people preserved themselves rather than through the version of history recorded by institutions.
Personal archives have long challenged official narratives, particularly when those narratives overlook, flatten, or deliberately erase the experiences of marginalized communities. For both the history it recovers and the question it raises about who gets to preserve a country’s memory, Do You Love Me feels like one of the festival’s essential documentary screenings.
Palestine
At the heart of Alex Bakri’s documentary is Hussein, a projectionist who has spent most of his life among film reels and ageing equipment at Cinema Jenin. When a foreign-funded initiative arrives to restore the abandoned cinema, what initially appears to be the revival of a shared cultural space gradually exposes a conflict over ownership, dignity, and who gets to determine what preservation should look like.
Hussein’s soot-covered hands, instinctive technical knowledge, and complete devotion to the cinema stand in sharp contrast to the paternalism of the European team overseeing the project. What begins as the portrait of an immensely charismatic man expands into a critique of NGO culture, cultural extraction, and development projects that claim to empower local communities while quietly marginalizing the very people whose histories they depend upon.
Habibi Hussein is ultimately both a love letter and an elegy: to Hussein, to Cinema Jenin, and to a form of local cultural stewardship steadily displaced by profit, bureaucracy, and outside intervention.
Libya
The most powerful political documentaries are often made by those who have lived with the consequences of politics firsthand. Most people know Muammar Qaddafi. Far fewer know the stories of the families whose lives were permanently shaped by his regime. In My Father and Qaddafi, filmmaker Jihan K. turns the camera towards one of those stories, tracing the disappearance of her father, Libyan opposition figure Mansur Rashid Kikhia.
What begins as a daughter’s search for answers gradually becomes something larger: a meditation on dictatorship, memory, and the countless lives authoritarian regimes attempt to erase from history. In reclaiming her father’s story, Jihan K. reminds us that the personal is often the most powerful way to understand the political.
A Sad and Beautiful World reunites director Cyril Aris and actor Mounia Akl years after they co-created and co-directed the low-budget web series Beirut, I Love You early in their careers.
Aris’s first fiction feature follows childhood sweethearts Nino and Yasmina across three decades of life in Lebanon, asking a question familiar to many across the region: can love survive when a country repeatedly asks you to leave it behind?
Selected as Lebanon’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, the film arrives in Amman with considerable momentum. Beyond the awards attention, however, its appeal lies in the way it transforms one couple’s relationship into a reflection on hope, migration, and the difficulty of building a future in a country caught in recurring crisis.
Egypt
There is something about Egyptian cinema at AIFF. Year after year, the festival has championed some of the country’s most exciting independent voices, and Yasser Shafiey’s Complaint No. 713317 feels poised to continue that tradition.
At first glance, the premise could not be simpler: an elderly couple’s refrigerator breaks down. What follows, however, is far more than a frustrating encounter with customer service.
Set almost entirely inside the couple’s apartment, Complaint No. 713317 transforms what appears to be a “non-event” into a quietly gripping meditation on bureaucracy, corruption, and the fragility of everyday life. Through repetition, dark humour, and the absurdity of an endlessly delayed repair, Shafiey exposes how ordinary people become trapped within systems that slowly erode their dignity.
Sudan
History runs through every frame of Suzannah Mirghani’s debut feature. Set in Sudan’s Gezira region, Cotton Queen follows Nafisa, a teenage girl whose selection for the annual Cotton Queen competition places her at the centre of forces larger than herself—from family expectations and economic pressure to the colonial history of cotton.
Drawing on personal, political, and agricultural histories, Mirghani crafts a coming-of-age story rooted in place, memory, and the lives of rural women. With touches of magical realism and a strong sense of female agency, the film also becomes an act of cultural preservation, presenting a vision of Sudan that extends far beyond war and displacement. It is an assured debut from a filmmaker we are likely to hear much more about.
Algeria
Arab cinema rarely ventures into horror—and even more rarely uses the genre to confront history. With Roqia, Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim delivers a striking debut that turns supernatural horror into a meditation on the country’s Black Decade. Djinn, possession, and ruqyah become more than genre devices; they serve as metaphors for religious extremism, collective trauma, and the violence that continues to haunt generations long after the conflict has ended.
Following its premiere at Venice Critics’ Week, Roqia arrives as one of the most distinctive recent entries in Arab genre cinema. Rather than relying on jump scares or spectacle, Koussim builds slow-burning tension through memory, silence, and an atmosphere that refuses to let the past remain buried. The result is a horror film that suggests the real monsters are rarely supernatural; they are the ideologies and histories that societies struggle to confront.
As Arab filmmakers continue to search for new ways of telling political stories, Roqia demonstrates that horror may be one of the region’s most powerful—and unsettling—cinematic languages.
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