It has been a whirlwind year for Middle Eastern cinema, with Gaza dominating every conversation related to the region’s cinema, from funding and distribution to the ethics of representation.
At Venice, The Voice of Hind Rajab stole the spotlight, as the strength of the film industry’s opposition to the war in Gaza reached its peak.
Elsewhere, the industry continues to feel the fallout of No Other Land’s Oscar win in March.
Outside of Gaza, this year’s offerings point to the rude health of independent Middle Eastern cinema, which continues to punch above its weight.
Collective memory, censorship, the lingering shadow of civil wars and the relentless pull of patriarchy dominated this autumn’s offerings.
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Here, Middle East Eye reviews some of the season’s best films.
Roqia
The electrifying debut feature by Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim is possibly the most effective Arab horror this century.
We begin in present day Algiers. An elderly raqi (Muslim exorcist) is summoned to drive out the demon that has taken over a young woman.
Despite a successful exorcism, the raqi’s powers appear to be waning. His losing battle with Alzheimer’s startles his protege, who fears that his death could unleash a barrage of dormant horror on the city.
The film then jumps to a different story: the mysterious case of a young father who has lost his memory in a car accident.
He comes back with a bandaged face, unrecognisable to his wife and children. To add to his woes, a secret he harbours comes back to disrupt any attempt at returning to his pre-accident domestic bliss.
The two narratives are connected thematically and politically by the 1991-2002 Algerian civil war (aka the Black Decade) and the violence that continues to threaten the country.
Koussim doesn’t resort to the tired Hollywood-ish jump scares. The director’s handheld camera gives the horror an unnerving, eerily relatable reality, augmented by the brooding cinematography of Jean-Marie Delorme.
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The constant and seamless shift between dark and light grows more entangled, with devastating effect.
True evil, Koussim suggests, can only be unleashed with the aid of susceptible men; true evil will continue to subside unless the nation faces up to its violent past.
Religion, the director underlines, was not the impetus for Algeria’s bloodiest decade – it was something more elemental, more sinister, more intrinsic to the wayward nature of man.
Roqia is a rare beast: a perceptive, smart and gripping horror that breathes new life into a genre that remains underexploited in Arab cinema.
It’s arguably the scariest Algerian horror film ever made, and announces the arrival of an exciting Arab talent.
Divine Comedy
The latest feature by writer and director Ali Asgari is the funniest Iranian pic this writer has seen in recent memory.
The protagonist, filmmaker Bahram (Bahram Ark), has previously featured in one of the most memorable segments of Terrestrial Verses, the biting, 2023 anthology Asgari co-directed with Alireza Khatami. Here, Bahram played a discontented version of himself having a surreal, Orwellian encounter with an unseen censor, who was coercing him to make bizarre changes to his movie or risk getting banned.
Divine Comedy starts with a similarly outlandish meeting between Bahram and another censor who is heard but not seen.
Bahram wants to obtain screening permission for his new film – a loose adaptation of Dante’s titular epic poem – but the censor is not happy with the fact the film is shot in Azeri Turkish and not Farsi, in spite of the fact the lead character happens to be Turkish.
He also demands the removal of an endearing dog character, since dogs, according to him, are deemed impure in Islam.
Bahram is battling the absurdity of a system that doesn’t have the capacity to recognise its own ludicrousness
Resistant to the censor’s unrealistic orders, Bahram and his producer Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari, Ali’s niece) embark on a treacherous quest to find a venue to screen their film illegally.
Along the way, the pair come across some of the most sidesplitting characters seen in any Iranian film. They include a cinema owner flaunting his bizarre notion of cinephilia (“I’m cinephile. I love Darren Aronofsky! Black Swan!); a former theatre actor gone mainstream and desperate for critical respect (“I only want to do arthouse now!”); and a wealthy animal activist who cares more about her pets than Bahram’s art.
Laced with numerous movie references – Roman Holiday, Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, The Matrix – Asgari’s fifth feature gives a new spin to the familiar commercialism-versus-art debate.
In Divine Comedy, mainstream cinema is treated as a state-sanctioned industry designed to reaffirm the Islamic Republic’s creed, and not to challenge it – producing frothy, harmless entertainment to distract the weary masses.
Bahram emerges as a quixotic figure, battling the absurdity of a system that doesn’t have the capacity to recognise its own ludicrousness.
The humour doesn’t conceal the strain of Bahram’s frustration, or the dissolution of his artistic vocation.
Asgari’s decision to set his story on the eve of Bashar al-Assad’s fall underlines the pettiness of a limp regime that compensates for its impotence by targeting art.
Divine Comedy is a far cry from Asgari’s more sombre early thrillers, injecting a much-needed levity and wit into his filmmaking without compromising the pathos and politics. One of the year’s most gratifying films.
Cotton Queen
The debut feature by multi-award winner Suzannah Mirghani is the first fiction feature directed by a Sudanese woman.
This coming-of-age tale is set in a cotton-farming village ruled with a rod of iron by the elderly matriarch Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud), who took over the plantation when Sudan gained its independence from Britain in 1956.
Al-Sit has cemented her reign with an aid of a long-held myth revolving around a British soldier she killed, a myth her workers scarcely question.
The relative harmony of the village is disrupted by the arrival of dashing Nadir (Hassan Kassala), a young businessman with ambitious plans to redevelop the plantation and take it into the 21st century by introducing genetically engineered seeds.
The heroine of the film, teenage Nafisa (Mihad Murtada), who works as a cotton collector on the plantation, finds herself being pawned in Al-Sit’s power games with Nadir. Rejecting Nadir’s advances, Nafisa decides to rebel.
Cotton Queen is based on Mirghani’s 2020 hit short Al-Sit, but unlike the short, this feature lacks focus. Myriad themes pop up: the legacy of colonialism; modernity versus tradition; female emancipation; the oppressive side of matriarchy; and female genital mutilation.
Mirghani never manages to integrate these loose strands into the central plot of Nafisa’s emancipation.
A tangible correlation between the legacy of British colonialism, Al-Sit’s management of the plantation and Nadir’s exploitative enterprise is not fully developed. Nor is the mythical dimension of Al-Sit’s heroic exploits against the Brits, despite copious references to it.
The conflict in Sudan forced the director to move the shoot to Egypt and change the visual palette of the movie. Frida Marzouk’s gorgeously naturalistic, sun-kissed cinematography stands at odds with the gothic-like sets, which are the most striking, most enigmatic character in the film.
The patchy, uneven performances fail to bring the emotion of the story to the fore. And the overstuffed script never takes the unpredictable left turns it constantly hints at.
There’s a lot of talent on display, but Mirghani’s much-anticipated debut fails to scale the heights set by its more compact source material.
Do You Love Me
The directorial debut by Lebanese director Lana Daher is another project long in the making, changing from a musical biopic of the 1970s band The Bandaly Family into an essay film offering a congested history of Lebanon over the past 70 years.
The film opens with the claim that Lebanese history is not taught in the nation’s schools. The film, Daher announces, is a visual reconstruction of the national narrative culled from movies, home videos, music videos, TV programmes and photography.
Footage from various independent films is featured, from the civil war-era films of Maroun Baghdadi and Borhane Alaouié and the existential meditations of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, to Nadim Tabet’s contemporary teenage drama One of These Days and Mounia Akl’s environmental tale Submarine.
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There is no tangible narration or voiceover. Do You Love Me relies on archival footage to tell the story of Lebanon’s sectarianism, the lingering Israeli threat, the corruption, endless economic crises, and the unshakeable resilience to carry on no matter what.
In Lebanon, Daher shows that time is circular. Common actions and events continue to repeat themselves throughout the history of the country, and its people, in the face of every calamity, simply push on and dance.
At best, the film can be seen as a love letter to Lebanese cinema; but given the fact that independent cinema was never popular in Lebanon, and was never part of the collective consciousness, Daher’s flimsy, sloppy thesis doesn’t hold true.
A major blind spot in the film is the absence of pop music videos whose artificiality speaks volumes about the evolving nature of the country – and arguably constitute an indispensable part of Lebanon’s cultural heritage regardless of their quality.
This renders Do You Love Me an intellectually hollow, one-trick pony that fails to deliver on its pompous, overreaching premise.
Coyotes
Palestine had to figure in the mix, yet this 20-minute short, recently crowned Best Short at the BFI Film Festival in London, will confound expectations with its embrace of genre tropes and atypical take on the occupation.
Young surgeon Lubna (Maria Zreik) bids Salma (Yumna Marwan) goodbye before heading home after a long hospital shift.
When her car breaks down on a desert road in the occupied West Bank, a stranger (Ali Suliman) suddenly emerges to offer help.
The kindness of the shady stranger swiftly takes a darker turn when secrets related to Lubna’s love life are revealed.
Taking a leaf out of the Hany Abu-Assad political genre playbook, the Palestinians of Coyotes are not your habitual helpless victims: director Said Zagha’s women are flawed, headstrong, and unabashedly desirous individuals ready to commit radical actions when their autonomy is threatened by a loathsome Israeli occupier subscribing to a system with no boundaries.
Zagha brilliantly captures the creeping mood of dread and distrust that govern the lives of average Palestinians striving to lead normal lives in the West Bank, away from the predatory eyes of Israeli occupiers.
The nocturnal, desolate backdrop acts as a silent witness to the imbalanced relationship between Palestine and Israel – in the dog-eat-dog world that Israel has created, Zagha implies, the rule of law no longer applies and it’s every man for himself.
The film is based on real accounts of Palestinians who have been blackmailed by Israeli operatives over their private lives.
Coyotes is let down by an ending that doesn’t entirely convince; but overall, the film is a bold, perceptive gem that sheds a vital light on a different angle of the Palestinian experience.
