Arab picks from LFF 2025

Aside from our recently reviewed Palestine 36, the BFI London Film Festival marked the festival run tailend for a number of films from the Arab world. Highlights include Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky, a rare, necessary, and beautifully dramatised account of migrant women from the Ivory Coast living in Tunisia, having made their way there for a variety of reasons (study, refuge...). Surprisingly few films have been made about intra-continental migration, despite this making up the vast majority of international migration patterns.

It doesn’t make the women’s plight any less harrowing. Erige Sehiri, who has a knack for filming female friendships, bonds and interactions with intimacy and heart (see Under the Fig Trees), tells the stories of Preacher Marie, young mother Naney and student Jolie who moved from their homeland in search of a better life. They end up looking after young Kenza, a 4 year-old girl washed ashore after losing her family in a perilous sea journey - a character heartbreakingly based on a real girl Erige met who did perish at sea with her mother. Sehiri’s nuanced, moving depiction of motherhood - Naney missing her daughter and unable to be with her, Marie taking Kenza under her wing yet aware that the girl isn’t hers - serves as a prism through which the hardship of the women’s displacement is told. Yet, there are great moments of humour and joy showing the resilience of these women.

An utterly original, surreal and quite gripping pick is Khartoum, the result of five directors’ efforts to piece together a heartfelt tribute to the Sudanese capital told throught the lives of five of its inhabitants. What started out as a UK backed small-scale project to create 5 short poems about Khartoum was entirely upended when the directors - one Brit and four Sudanese + the Khartoum residents they were filming were forced to flee following the outbreak of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in 2023. They used what production money they had left to flee to Kenya and, once there, all eventually rekindled to put together a different film. In the absence of footage and filming locations, they end up drawing on a variety of other funding bodies and opportunities to use greenscreen and animation to re-create scenes of everyday life in Khartoum. It’s done in a similar vein to The Act of Killing and although some of the scenes they "perform" are heartbreaking, the end film is full of humour, joy, and colour. While director Rawya Al Haj is keen to stress the importance of raising political awareness about the conflict in Sudan and counter media misinformation - very much a proxy war as opposed to a civil war - Khartoum is a truly uplifting, rousing love letter to the both the city and its people.

Zain Duraie’s Sink is a (criminally) rare film from the Arab world that tackles complex family dynamics and mental health. Duraie handles the subject with so much nuance, maturity and compassion that it came as a surprise to find out this was her first feature. Her first foray into filmmaking was in fact as Annemarie Jacir’s assistant and there’s something of that same treatment of intergenerational banter, of the intimacy of everyday interactions. The film tells the story of a mum (Clara Khoury, also starring in The Voice of Hind Rajab) dealing with the deterioriation of her son’s mental health and the eventual fallout on her personal and professional lives and the rest of the family. Unsurprisingly, Duraie found it near impossible to garner interest on the part of the usual line up of European funders and co-productions given the subject matter. Eventually, other funding partners stepped in and the film saw the light of the day after five years in the making.