Art & Culture

‘Arabs Are Cursed to Only Talk About Politics. Why Can’t We Talk About Mental Health?’: Jordanian Filmmaker Zain Duraie on ‘SINK’

BYMeriem Belhiba

July 28, 2026

Ahead of its Jordanian premiere at the Amman International Film Festival (AIFF), both screenings of SINK had sold out. For Jordanian filmmaker Zain Duraie, the response carried particular meaning: after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and screening at the BFI London Film Festival, Mannheim-Heidelberg and Carthage, her debut feature was finally coming home.

MILLE sat down with Duraie to discuss how SINK turns to motherhood, mental health, and the quiet crises unfolding behind closed doors, while insisting that Arab cinema should have the freedom to tell stories beyond the narrow expectations placed upon it.

“It’s a very Ammani film,” she says.

The description is less about geography than perspective. Rather than presenting Jordan through familiar landmarks or the images international audiences often associate with the region, SINK enters the private life of an educated, financially comfortable family and lingers inside a crisis unfolding almost entirely behind closed doors.

The film follows a mother trying to care for a son whose behavior has become increasingly unpredictable. Yet Duraie resists turning his condition into either a diagnosis or a plot device. The audience is never told exactly what is wrong with him. Instead, we experience the uncertainty through the mother herself.

There are few explanations and little dialogue. Fear accumulates quietly through unfinished conversations, restrained gestures, and the mother’s growing sense that she is losing control. Rather than observing her ordeal from a distance, the audience is placed inside her emotional world.

“My goal was to protect the mother and to protect the boy,” Duraie says. “I wanted to keep the tenderness between them and to humanize him.”

That choice prevents the son from becoming the familiar cinematic figure of the mentally ill man defined only by danger. The mother, meanwhile, is never reduced to a heroic figure who always knows the right thing to do. She is frightened, exhausted, and often unsure how to respond, yet unable to withdraw her love.

“She was never equipped for this,” the filmmaker says. “You don’t know that your son might become violent. You don’t know that he might turn against you. You don’t know what to do.”

Although mental health drives the story, Duraie describes SINK primarily as a film about motherhood. More specifically, it is about the impossible responsibility often placed on mothers to absorb whatever happens inside a family. The father remains emotionally distant, leaving the mother to carry much of the crisis alone.

“There are more expectations placed on mothers,” Duraie says. “The father avoids what is happening, while she has to carry the boy alone.”

Motherhood has long occupied her work. Her award-winning short Give Up the Ghost examined fertility and the social value assigned to women through their ability to have children. In SINK, she turns to another maternal fear: what happens when love can no longer protect either the child or the mother.

Duraie is not interested in idealized mothers. She is drawn to the contradictions inside maternal love. The devotion mixed with fear, tenderness strained by exhaustion, and the guilt of wanting to protect one child from another.

“I’m not a mother,” she says, “but there is something that changes in a woman after she creates a child. There is so much richness in that relationship.”

Her own mother became an important source of inspiration during the writing process, alongside extensive research into families living with mental illness. Yet she does not treat the film’s characters as direct portraits of real people.

“There is a lot of me in the mother,” she says. “And there is a lot of me in the son. As an artist, there is something of you in every character.”

The emotional force of the film became especially clear during an informal test screening in Aqaba. The audience included mothers, members of women’s organizations, people from the mental health community, and viewers from different social backgrounds. By the end, many were crying. Some began speaking openly about experiences inside their own families.

One woman approached Duraie afterwards. “Maybe my son is really ill,” she told her. “Your film made me realize that I need to do something.”

Another viewer later shared that watching SINK had transformed his relationship with his mother. The two had barely spoken for ten years, but after seeing the film, they began rebuilding their relationship. For Duraie, moments like these cut through the machinery that often surrounds filmmaking.

“Cinema is not just glamor, red carpets, awards, or festivals,” she says. “There is something much deeper. It can change somebody’s perspective. It can change a life.”

Perhaps that is why she has described SINK as “the film of my life.” She does not mean that she has no ambition to make more work. She is already considering her next project and wants to continue exploring psychological drama, ambiguity, and stories led by women. What she questions is whether she will ever again make something with the same degree of emotional exposure.

“I always ask myself: will I ever be this genuine again? Will I ever be this truthful and emotional again?” For Duraie, that vulnerability was possible because she refused to shape the film around anyone else’s expectations. She did not begin with the subjects Arab filmmakers are so often encouraged to address, nor did she attempt to make Jordan legible through poverty, displacement, or political conflict.

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“I did not check any box,” she says. “I did not try to satisfy the West, Europe or anyone else. I made this film for me.” That decision would eventually place SINK at the centre of a much larger question: who gets to decide what an Arab film should look like?

Those “boxes,” Duraie says, are rarely stated outright. Instead, they surface in meetings, funding discussions, and post-screening conversations, often disguised as simple questions. Why wasn’t the story set in a remote village? Why did the family appear financially comfortable? Why wasn’t the film more explicitly about poverty, refugees or politics?

Her answer never changed. “Because in Amman, we don’t live in a remote village,” she says. “We live in houses. We have people with good educations. We have people who went to private schools.”

For Duraie, these questions reveal a deeper problem. Arab filmmakers are too often expected to make their societies legible through a narrow catalogue of images—war, displacement, oppression, extremism or poverty. Those stories are undeniably important, she says, but they have gradually become shorthand for what an “Arab film” is supposed to look like.

“Arabs are cursed to only talk about politics,” she says. “Why can’t we talk about mental health?”

It is a question that sits at the heart of SINK. Duraie is not arguing that Arab cinema should turn away from political realities. Rather, she is insisting that it should also be free to tell quieter stories: those unfolding inside middle-class homes, between mothers and sons, or within families struggling with crises that remain hidden from public view. “Sometimes that is not our reality,” she says. “Sometimes there are good Arab men. Sometimes we have an okay society. We are people with normal problems too.”

Ironically, it was precisely the film’s specificity that made it resonate far beyond Jordan. Audiences in Toronto connected with the family despite knowing little about Amman, while viewers in Tunisia told Duraie that the silence surrounding mental illness felt immediately familiar. The more truthful the story became to its own setting, the more universal it seemed.

“That is what true art is,” she says. “You want people to connect with your story.”

That commitment to authenticity also shaped the way SINK was financed. Backed by Arab institutions and produced by prominent Jordanian film producer Alaa Alasad, the Arabic drama was developed without the pressure to reshape its story for international expectations. For Duraie, that freedom was essential. It allowed her to make a film rooted in her own experience of Jordan rather than in someone else’s imagination of it.

Duraie is drawn to psychological drama, where emotion accumulates gradually and ambiguity is never treated as a flaw to be corrected. Dialogue is sparse, explanations are withheld, and viewers are asked to sit with uncertainty rather than rush toward easy conclusions. She credits filmmakers such as Claire Denis, along with French and Italian art-house cinema, as important influences. But more than any particular tradition, she is interested in resisting predictability.

“When you lose ambiguity, people are not interested anymore,” she says. “When something becomes predictable, the audience says, ‘I saw it coming.'” In SINK, that resistance appears everywhere. Just as the audience anticipates an outburst, the film chooses restraint. Just as the son seems about to become a familiar stereotype, Duraie restores his vulnerability. The film repeatedly refuses the most obvious dramatic turn, asking viewers to remain inside uncertainty rather than escape it.

Her next feature is still in its early stages, but she already knows it will continue exploring the complexity of women’s lives. Women, she believes, remain among the richest yet least fully explored subjects in Arab cinema. “There is so much to being a woman,” she says. “There is so much complexity.”

Perhaps that is ultimately what Duraie is defending—not simply the freedom to make one particular film, but the freedom to expand the emotional and imaginative possibilities of Arab cinema itself.

War, exile and political violence will continue to shape the region’s stories. They should. But they cannot be the only stories the world expects to hear. There must also be room for films like SINK: stories about mothers and sons, about invisible struggles, about ordinary families navigating extraordinary emotional burdens. Stories that refuse spectacle in favour of intimacy, and certainty in favor of compassion.

Put simply: “We have to show that we are people with normal problems too.”

‘Arabs Are Cursed to Only Talk About Politics. Why Can’t We Talk About Mental Health?’: Jordanian Filmmaker Zain Duraie on ‘SINK’

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‘Arabs Are Cursed to Only Talk About Politics. Why Can’t We Talk About Mental Health?’: Jordanian Filmmaker Zain Duraie on ‘SINK’

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