Art & Culture

Beyond the Frame: Why AIFF 2026’s Non-Arab Competition Is One of the Festival’s Most Exciting Sections

BYMeriem Belhiba

July 29, 2026

Every year, the Amman International Film Festival (AIFF) asks audiences to discover cinema through a different lens. This year’s edition, running until Aug. 3, unfolds under the theme “Beyond the Frame,” inviting viewers to look past the image itself and towards the emotions, histories, and human experiences that exist just outside it. It is an idea that resonates throughout the festival, but nowhere more clearly than in the Non-Arab Feature Competition.

Bringing together seven debut features from Germany, South Africa, Canada, Nigeria, Brazil, Spain, and Belgium, the section doesn’t simply showcase emerging filmmakers from around the world. Instead, it presents seven remarkably different approaches to the same question: how do ordinary people hold on to themselves when memory, family, migration, grief, or justice begin to reshape their lives?

As Murad Abu Eisheh, Head of Programming for the festival’s Non-Arab Features and Arab Documentary Competition, puts it, this year’s selection revolves around “the bonds that shape our existence,” exploring how individual lives are formed under wider social and political forces without losing sight of their humanity. That idea runs through every film in the programme.

Among the standout titles is My Father’s Shadow, British-Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr.’s acclaimed debut, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Set against Nigeria’s landmark 1993 presidential election, the film follows two young brothers spending a single day with the father they barely know. Rather than recounting political history directly, Davies filters national upheaval through childhood, turning an intimate family reunion into a meditation on memory, masculinity, and the fragile relationship between fathers and sons.

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Memory also lies at the heart of A Fading Man, German director Welf Reinhart’s quietly affecting drama. When a woman’s former husband, now living with dementia, unexpectedly returns believing they are still married, decades of carefully buried emotions begin to resurface. What follows is less a conventional love triangle than a moving reflection on what remains of love when memory itself begins to disappear. Premiering in Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition, the film blends tenderness, melancholy, and unexpected humour while asking whether relationships can survive once the past has been erased.

Brazilian filmmaker Grace Passô takes another approach to grief in Our Secret. Following the death of a family member, a Black Brazilian family struggles to reconnect while living under the same roof but inhabiting entirely different emotional worlds. As the youngest child uncovers a secret hidden within the house itself, the film transforms domestic space into something almost spiritual, exploring mourning not as a single event but as something inherited, lived with, and slowly confronted together.

Elsewhere, Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City shifts the conversation towards belonging. Set inside Madrid’s Cañada Real, one of Europe’s largest informal settlements, the coming-of-age drama follows a teenage Roma boy confronting the possibility that the only home he has ever known may disappear. Rather than reducing its community to headlines about poverty or marginalization, the film focuses on adolescence, friendship, and first love, allowing the politics of displacement to emerge naturally through everyday life.

Questions of migration continue in Lucky Lu, Lloyd Lee Choi’s debut feature, which centres on a Chinese immigrant working as a delivery driver while trying to build a life in Canada. Through one man’s daily routines and mounting pressures, the film examines the invisible labor, resilience, and quiet sacrifices that underpin the migrant experience, offering an intimate portrait of ambition far removed from familiar narratives of success or failure.

South African filmmaker Zamo Mkhwanazi’s Laundry likewise finds extraordinary emotional weight in ordinary spaces. Set around a laundromat where different lives intersect, the film explores dignity, survival, and human connection through the routines that often go unnoticed. In doing so, it transforms an everyday setting into a portrait of contemporary South Africa, where personal struggles quietly reflect broader social realities.

The competition concludes with We Believe You, the Belgian debut by Charlotte Devillers and Arnaud Dufeys. Tackling questions of truth, testimony, and institutional power, the film examines what it means to be believed—or dismissed—when navigating systems that claim to deliver justice. Rather than offering easy answers, it invites audiences into the moral ambiguities surrounding credibility, trauma, and accountability.

Taken together, the seven films reveal a striking pattern, looking closely at the quiet moments where lives begin to change: a forgotten marriage, an absent father, an inherited home, a disappearing neighbourhood, or a story finally told. In keeping with the festival’s theme, these are films that encourage audiences to look beyond what is immediately visible, uncovering the emotional landscapes that exist just outside the frame.

For a festival dedicated to first features, that feels especially fitting.

Beyond the Frame: Why AIFF 2026’s Non-Arab Competition Is One of the Festival’s Most Exciting Sections

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Beyond the Frame: Why AIFF 2026’s Non-Arab Competition Is One of the Festival’s Most Exciting Sections

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