Art & Culture

The Rising Female Filmmakers Making Their Mark at the 2026 Amman International Film Festival

BYMeriem Belhiba

July 27, 2026

At the seventh Amman International Film Festival – Awal Film (AIFF), their work moves between intimate family stories, political memory, migration, colonial legacies, and the fragile search for freedom. Some arrive in Amman after premieres at Sundance, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto. Others are introducing films whose festival journeys are only just beginning.

Working across fiction, documentary, and short-form cinema, these ten filmmakers bring with them distinct worlds, visual languages, and ways of looking at the region. Presented alphabetically, these are the women to know at AIFF 2026.

Amel Guellaty

Tunisian director, screenwriter, and photographer Amel Guellaty brings a restless sense of movement and visual imagination to Where the Wind Comes From. Her debut feature follows Alyssa and Mehdi, two childhood friends who leave the outskirts of Tunis for Djerba after an art competition appears to offer them a route towards another life.

Blending social realism with dreamlike sequences, music and animation, the film captures the frustration and possibility of a generation raised in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution.

Where the Wind Comes From had its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025, before making its European premiere in the Harbour programme at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Its festival run has since been marked by an impressive list of awards. The film won the Golden Bee for Best Feature Film at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival, where Eya Bellagha also received the Best Performance award, as well as the Generation Jury Award at the Galway Film Fleadh. It later received the El Gouna Star for Best Arab Narrative Film at the 2025 El Gouna Film Festival, before winning both the Audience Award and Best Screenplay at the 2025 Carthage Film Festival.

Aysha Shahaltough

Jordanian actor, writer, and filmmaker Aysha Shahaltough first became known to audiences through her role as Vera in Netflix’s Jinn. With Cleanse the Streets, she steps behind the camera for her directorial debut.

Developed through the AFAC x Netflix Supporting Women in Film programme, the 17-minute thriller follows two sisters driving through an isolated landscape as they attempt to escape their father’s anger.

What initially appears to be a story of flight gradually becomes something more unsettling: an examination of fear, violence, and the ideas women are taught about men, honor, and their own bodies.

Cleanse the Streets had its world premiere in the official competition of the 2025 Beirut International Short Film Festival, before screening in the New Vision section of the Red Sea International Film Festival. It was later included among the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Market Picks and selected for the international competition at the 2026 Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia.

Joanna Arida

Jordanian actor, writer, and filmmaker Joanna Arida first became widely known through her role as Rania in Netflix’s AlRawabi School for Girls. With a background in architecture and filmmaking studies at the New York Film Academy, she now turns to directing with Is It Still Me, her first short as a writer-director.

The 19-minute psychological drama follows Fareeda, an artist whose carefully ordered world begins to fracture. Familiar objects disappear, spaces seem to shift, and her daughter’s behaviour becomes increasingly difficult to understand.

By positioning the audience inside Fareeda’s disorientation, Arida approaches dementia not simply as memory loss, but as the gradual erosion of identity, certainty, and control over how others perceive us.

Supported by the Jordan Film Fund in 2024 and completed in early 2026, Is It Still Me enters AIFF’s Arab Short Film Competition at the beginning of its festival journey.

Lana Daher

Lebanese filmmaker Lana Daher turns to the images people preserved themselves in order to reconstruct the history of a country without a comprehensive national archive.

Her debut feature documentary, Do You Love Me, draws on decades of cinema, home videos, television broadcasts, and audiovisual fragments to create a portrait of Lebanon shaped as much by private memory as by public history.

Rather than arranging the past into a conventional chronology, Daher treats the archive as something alive, fragmented, and deeply personal. The film becomes at once a love letter to Beirut and an inquiry into who gets to record, preserve, and narrate a country’s story.

Following its premiere at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori in 2025, Do You Love Me continued to Filmfest Hamburg, where it received the Political Film Award, and Doclisboa, where it earned an honourable mention.

Meryem Benm’Barek

Moroccan writer-director Meryem Benm’Barek established herself internationally with Sofia, her 2018 feature debut about an unmarried young woman confronting Morocco’s social and legal restrictions after giving birth.

The film screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, where Benm’Barek received the Best Screenplay Award, marking her as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from contemporary Moroccan cinema.

Her second feature, Behind the Palm Trees, shifts the setting to Tangier. Aspiring architect Mehdi is drawn away from his girlfriend Selma after meeting Marie, a wealthy French woman whose family owns a villa in the kasbah.

Through the resulting triangle, Benm’Barek examines desire, class aspiration, and the colonial hierarchies that continue to shape contemporary Moroccan life.

Behind the Palm Trees had its world premiere at the Marrakech International Film Festival in late 2025 and later made its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2026.

Oumnia Hanader

Born in Ténès, Algeria, and raised in Marseille, Oumnia Hanader began her career as an actor before moving into screenwriting and directing.

Her work is closely informed by migration, family separation, and the instability of trying to build a life away from home. Those concerns come together in Bimo, her 23-minute short about Sihem, a young woman struggling to find her footing in France.

Her fragile sense of stability is disrupted when her mother calls to tell her that her brother has taken to the sea in an attempt to join her. What begins as a single phone call opens onto the emotional realities hidden behind familiar stories of migration.

Made through La CinéFabrique, Bimo was selected for La Cinef at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, before competing at Côté Court and receiving a Special Jury Mention in the Student Films Competition at the 2026 Premiers Plans Festival in Angers.

Sanaa El Alaoui

Moroccan director, screenwriter, and film scholar Sanaa El Alaoui first attracted attention with the award-winning documentary short Icarus. She returned to fiction with Aïcha, a 25-minute short that moves between live action, Super 8 footage and animation.

The film explores grief, trauma, and the emotional distance between a teenage girl and her mother, replacing linear storytelling with a more fluid space in which memory, violence, life and death overlap.

Aïcha premiered in the International Short Film Competition at the 2025 Krakow Film Festival before travelling to festivals including the Brooklyn Film Festival, HollyShorts, Durban, and the Beirut International Women Film Festival.

It went on to win the Audience Award at AfryKamera in Warsaw, Best Female Director at the Yellowstone International Film Festival, and the Silver Tutankhamun Mask for Best Short Film at the Luxor African Film Festival.

Suzannah Mirghani

Sudanese filmmaker and writer Suzannah Mirghani first gained international recognition with Al-Sit, her award-winning short about three generations of women negotiating marriage, tradition, and power in a Sudanese cotton-farming village.

Her feature debut, Cotton Queen, returns to that landscape on a broader historical scale. Set in Sudan’s Gezira region, the film follows teenage Nafisa as she finds herself caught between her grandmother’s authority, her family’s expectations, and the arrival of a businessman whose plans threaten to transform the village.

In Mirghani’s hands, cotton becomes more than a crop. It is a thread connecting colonial history, economic power, memory, and the struggle for female self-determination.

Before production, Cotton Queen received the ArteKino International Prize at Cannes’ L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation. It later had its world premiere at Venice International Film Critics’ Week in September 2025, before making its North American premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival.

The film went on to win the Golden Alexander – Theo Angelopoulos Award for Best Feature Film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the inaugural Doha Film Festival.

Zahraa Ghandour

Iraqi actor, filmmaker, and producer Zahraa Ghandour began her career in television, working as a writer, presenter, and documentary director before gaining international recognition through performances in films including The Journey, Baghdad in My Shadow, and Baghdad Messi.

With Flana, she moves behind the camera for her feature directorial debut.

The deeply personal documentary begins with Ghandour’s search through Baghdad for Nour, a childhood friend who disappeared at the age of ten. That search gradually opens onto the stories of other forgotten girls, exposing the violence, abandonment, and family silence that allow women to disappear both physically and from collective memory.

Flana had its world premiere in the TIFF Docs programme at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, reportedly becoming the first film by an Iraqi woman director to screen at TIFF.

It later made its MENA premiere at the Cairo International Film Festival and its European premiere in IDFA’s International Competition, where it was nominated for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature.

Zain Duraie

Jordanian writer and director Zain Duraie has emerged as one of the most promising new voices in Arab cinema. She first gained international recognition with her short film Give Up the Ghost, which premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival and won Best Arab Short at the El Gouna Film Festival.

Named a Berlinale Talent in 2024 and one of Screen International’s Arab Stars of Tomorrow, Duraie continued her international rise with her debut feature, SINK. The film premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival as the only Arab title in the Discovery section and was also the sole Arab film selected for the BFI London Film Festival’s First Feature Competition.

Since then, SINK has travelled widely across the international festival circuit, receiving several major distinctions, including the Ecumenical Jury Award at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival and the Bronze Tanit at the Carthage Film Festival.

The Rising Female Filmmakers Making Their Mark at the 2026 Amman International Film Festival

Amel Guellaty

Aysha Shahaltough

Joanna Arida

Lana Daher

Meryem Benm’Barek

Oumnia Hanader

Sanaa El Alaoui

Suzannah Mirghani

Zahraa Ghandour

Zain Duraie

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The Rising Female Filmmakers Making Their Mark at the 2026 Amman International Film Festival

Amel Guellaty

Aysha Shahaltough

Joanna Arida

Lana Daher

Meryem Benm’Barek

Oumnia Hanader

Sanaa El Alaoui

Suzannah Mirghani

Zahraa Ghandour

Zain Duraie

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