Discoveries from Saudi Arabia World Cinema

A pious old man, who is a proponent of suicide attackers, comes to Kabul to visit his only son, who, after the holy war had remained in the Soviet Union. He had enrolled his son in a religious school "to study the Koran and return to the village as a Mullah". In Kabul he learns that his son had decided to become a divine suicide bomber so as to go to Heaven. The film presents two different forces of the inner world of the protagonist father: paternal feelings and the holy religious ideology. The spectator witnesses how he loses his only son and holy belief. Shot in chaotic and dirty Kabul, the film portrays the incorrect interpretation of religion and the conflict of generations.

In a destroyed world, Youssef is chosen to be the subject of an experiment: a mental journey through time to find advanced means of survival. He must return to the past, aided by a childhood image that left a lasting impression on him. There, he will face his destiny, an eternal and impossible love story.

Away from preying eyes, a young unmarried couple retreat to the depth of a desolate run-down Egyptian seaside resort, to make love. The power dynamic between them is tested, when the girl reveals she wants their relationship to end.

The film tells the story of Said, an agricultural engineer , who one day decided to emigrate to Canada for improve their standard of living. But his bag will be stolen from him, which contains all the documents necessary for his trip. Said, accompanied by the sister of the thief, who recently returned from Canada, they begin to follow her brother among a group of villages.

It's around depressed guy who wake up one day and surprised that he is alone in this world.. And while he walking in street he will found himself alone and all people disappeared .. Then he will found an old camera.. Once he look to the street through the camera he will surprised that all people there .. and so when he put it down he will found that people disappeared again .. And then he realized that the camera is his hope to see people and world through the photographing.

After the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, children try to sing the national anthem as citizens search for hope in the war-torn South.

A copy of the filmmakers' first feature film disappeared somewhere in Yemen on the 10th anniversary of the reunification of north and south. A year later, they returned to track down the print, embarking on a journey that would take them across forbidding terrain from Sana to Aden. What they discover is a land of contradictions where film is openly reviled and secretly loved, teaching them much about their status as filmmakers in the Middle East.

In a tangled landscape of dream and reality, Hind recounts a strange dream about wandering alone in the desert, meeting an old oracle, and glimpsing a future desert city.

Director Sameer Arif delves into the world of crime and gangs in the film "The Disappearance of Salem."

During the Lebanese civil war, thousands of people disappeared. In most cases, the bodies were not found and the circumstances of their disappearance never known. Today, I travel through Beirut, asking the inhabitants I encounter, one same question: Do you know anyone who was kidnapped here during the war? My investigation carries me through the many districts around the "Green line", which used to divide Beirut between East and West, and where militias set up their checkpoints, the scenes of many kidnappings, and crimes. I thereby attempt to trigger the process of memory and to reveal the multiplicity of existing discourses on the war and the immensity of the drama. As I cross town and discover places laden with history, I draw a personal map of this city.

Blending extensive family archives with striking and surreal location work, the film retraces the life of Fatimazahra, a young woman born with a rare genetic disorder that made exposure to sunlight deadly. She lived a parallel, nocturnal existence and founded a community known as the Children of the Moon. Following her death in 2023, the group traveled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to live beneath the polar night, seeking a world where darkness offers safety.

In the oldest fun park of Beirut, four young friends go on a Ferris Wheel. During this claustrophobic open-air journey, they touch on intimate subjects such as relationships and sex, but Suzie’s breakup advice for Joanna leads to an unexpected confession.

A boy fall asleep from Alfajr prayer while he was watching his phone and then he had a nightmare about the devil In a terrifying serial mold.

A portmanteau feature that is an often laugh-out-loud portrait of Lebanon and all its myriad charms and idiosyncrasies.

The year is 1946. Under the strict orders of their father, Adam drags his younger brother Ali to witness their grandfather's corpse get washed before burial. Their cousin Iman, their constant playmate, is excluded from the ritual because she is a girl. The sight of the corpse has a profound effect on Adam; he announces that he doesn’t want to grow up and, from that moment on, he stops aging. As the years pass, the villagers come to believe Adam is cursed, while his brother, grappling with his own aging, feels Adam should be institutionalized. Only Iman and Anki, a shepherd and Adam’s lifelong best friend, see his condition as a blessing, preserving in him the pure, innocent goodness of a child. A haunting and beautiful story set against the oases and dust storms of Iraq.

Under the shade of a lemon tree, a Palestinian woman, Khaldieh, prepares herself a humble breakfast, remembering her former life and lost homeland with an assemblage of simple elements.

A man and a woman meet while seeking cover from the rain. The conversation that follows could lead them to a new surprise in life.

Michel, a French national, lives in the Riad adjoining the house of Boujemâa and turns it into a guest house. The noise resulting from the tourist activities and songs of the rooster poisons the relations between the two neighbors.

Which part of a sheep is tastiest? What's so funny about funerals? A Lebanese comic answers your burning questions!

After years of suppressing her dream, a passionate screenwriter finds herself facing her fears that she embodied as a reality in front of her

A guy who makes silly puns with his friends realizes that he's showing symptoms of a new pandemic.

10 year old Molouk who seeking to preside over surviving children lives her friends by pulling out copper write from ruined houses.

Focusing on remembering and also the longing that they felt on the voyage through the shared footsteps of two rappers, Jojo M and Galaaa, and the director, before and after their migration from Redeyef in Tunisia to Nantes in France.

The story follows Hind (20), who at a young age, witnessed her father kill her mother and then went on to suffer years of abuse at the hands of her father. When Hind escapes from her abusive home, she gets sent to live in a housing shelter. While there, Hind makes the first friends she's ever had and enjoys the freedom away from her father. However, when the manager of the housing shelter informs Hind that her father has requested to take her home, Hind decides to take matters into her own hands and get sent to the solitary confinement room in order to join her mother in heaven as she can't stand the thought of living with her father again.

The film tells about the problems of four men (Karim, Amin, Tarek, Said), Karim's problem is the difficulty of communicating with women, which leads him to consult a psychiatrist who tells him that he suffers from women's phobia. Amine Is an entrepreneur, and his dream is to marry a supermodel. Tariq on the other hand is an actor with several transient relationships with women, while hoping to find the women of his life one day for marriage, Saeed, a surgeon, dreams of a rich woman who builds a private clinic for him

A man from Tarfaya, penetrated by the magnificence of his country, the power of its beauty and the nomadic life of his ancestors goes in search of a great popular poet. He would be able to teach him wisdom, music, and the wonderful art of singing and poetry.

Tawfiq’s Reef chronicles the plight of Palestinian fishermen in Gaza, heavily restricted in the area in which they can fish, often indebted, shot at, harassed or imprisoned by the Israeli Navy on the narrow sliver of fishing waters available to them off the Gaza coastline, making this one of the most dangerous professions in the world.

A year after the euphoria on Tahrir Square, the demonstrators' goals have not even come close to being reached. The country is ruled with an iron fist and there is still no democracy. The 'eye of the world' has moved elsewhere. How things have been in Egypt since 25 January 2011 is explained using five portraits of people from various walks of life.

A duel between two students on who has it tougher in his academic life.

In the privacy of her own home, a Syrian woman shares her thoughts and feelings, talking about her existence, and her desire to be open about her sexuality in a conservative society.

Set against the backdrop of the unrest during the pre-revolution period of January 25, 2011, by following the stories of six relationships in different stages that express ambition, happiness and disappointments, that are connected with Asham , a street vendor, who expresses optimism about Egypt's future.

A famous football player, girls flock to his love, and he faces problems with the preacher of one of the girls, but he is also subjected to one of his relatives, who came specially from the level to take revenge on him.

BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors.

Forty-five years after he was expelled from his village in the Syrian Golan Heights, Mustafa steals across the Israeli border with the help of a local smuggler. This is a one-way trip for Mustafa, as he contemplates the end of his life.

"Mustapha" a taxi driver in the city of Tangier, during one of his trips the driver will accidentally meet a lost woman named "Toraya", who is foreign to the city and has no place to live in. Mustafa admires the woman and takes her to his house to stay with his wife, so problems start

Chronicles of everyday life in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion.

Majed discovers that his recently deceased mother used to be a belly dancer. Life is full of unknowns and this is just now becoming clear to him. Torn between his relationship with his now-silent father, and Hanine, the woman who will help him overcome his grief, Majed takes a trip down memory lane into the mysterious past of his mother.

Omar Amiralay examines how Yemen's revolution comes to fruition. There is a mix of hope that here perhaps a state will succeed in the socialist project, with the knowledge of how it slipped off at home.

The Children of Ibdaa: To Create Something Out of Nothing is a 30-minute documentary about a Palestinian children's dance troupe from Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank. The children use their performance to express the history, struggle, and aspirations of the Palestinian people, specifically the right to return to their homeland.

Chaibia spends her childhood and adolescence in poverty and in the illiteracy. Her life changes when she is contacted with the paints of her son. The true history of the great painter Chaibia Talal from Morocco.

Beirut, Lebanon 2017. As the country trembles a man decides to attempt to break the world record of depth in deep diving.

In the Sharjah desert, Sultan Zeib Khan makes the rounds of the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis where the foundations of the nation are kept. Amid the tombs, the vastness of the desert is palpable. Time plays no role in the ritual that Zeib Khan has performed daily for the past 20 years.