Women Directors and Their Stories in the Contemporary Arab World
Like many other film industries in the world, the number of female directors in the Arab region has been increasing over the past three decades with the rise of digital technology and filmmaking education. As its focus on the first and second works of new directors, almost half of the selections made by Amman International Film Festival at its sixth edition were by female directors. They comprised four out of ten narrative features, three out of seven documentaries, seven out of 13 shorts in competition, and seven out of 13 out-of-competition films at the festival, which took place from 2-10 July.
Opening the festival, Palestinian filmmaker Maha Haj brings us into the slow mode of silence and stillness confronted by the parents of five children, Suleiman and Lubna (played by Mohammed Bakri and Areen Omari), who live in a remote farm with grief and sorrow in a short Upshot (2024). Initially, the couple seem to pass their daily lives and routine without difficulties like many other elders that we see in Palestine today. Nevertheless, Haj shares the hidden collective past pains which seem to be kept unnoticed by one individual family rising from the patriarchy of the husband or father. That is, until the day that the couple confront a stranger to rewind their own past suffering and tragedy.
Family matters become one of the main themes in the storytelling of these young filmmakers from the region – no matter what their gender. In the documentary competition, We Are Inside (2024), sees Lebanese director Farah Kassem go back to her hometown, after decades away, to take care of her aging father. The three-hour documentary does not only chart the father-and-daughter relationship, which needs time and understanding to cross over their generational divide and the longtime absence of bonding. Through the beauty of words and rhyme in the poetry with which his father has long been associated in his own town, their bond is reconstructed. Nevertheless, under the refinement of the individual bond that was built between them, the political instability is revealed as a backdrop to show contemporary Lebanese society to the outside world.
Growing up in the Belgian environment throughout her life, Moroccan director Samira El Mouzghibati decides to confront the longtime estrangement between mothers and daughters in making her documentary feature (Y)our Mother (2024). As a young woman who followed her just-married husband to start a new life in a foreign land, the mother has lived her own free life that might be different from her daughters, which has made their relationship distant, in such a way that the mother was then often referred to among the daughters as “(Y)our mother,” instead of our mother. For the first time, Mouzghibati lets her mother speak up herself and then they realize that it is the freedom that they all share and have inherited from their mother. Both We Are Inside and (Y)our Mother share the Black Iris award in the documentary category from the festival this year.
From Jordan, Rand Beiruty chooses to cross over her motherland to depict the transnational lives of seven migrant girls in a new land, Eberwalde in East Germany, in Tell Them About Us (2024). From an Arab, Kurdish and Roma background, the girls meet during their participation in a workshop where they learn, explore and express their voices. They compromise, challenge, argue and protest to maintain their freedom and independence in a new home and hope to settle down with confidence. Beiruty wisely shows the girls’ lives in diverse modes, from enjoyment to melancholy. The film is fresh, pure and authentic.
In the narrative section, Egyptian director Noha Adel starts her directorial debut Spring Came on Laughing (2024) by exploring the lives of four groups of people in different communities in the springtime. All of the four shorts present normal talks between each character before the conversation becomes heated and ends in verbal fights. Starting with the chats of four neighbors – one old man and his son, and another old woman and her daughter, the dialogue becomes tense when the old man’s son tries to propose to the old lady for his father. It seems that the younger man and woman used to be in love before they broke up. The second group focuses on the conversation in a female beauty salon, which finally becomes heated when a woman loses her ring. The suspects are a boy and his mother, who later finds out that her son really has stolen it. The third argument happens in a restaurant when a group of five female friends hang out together but ends with a big quarrel among them due to a misunderstanding. The last section takes place at a wedding ceremony when the mother of the bride is discontented with one of her daughter’s bridesmaids.
Adel’s omnibus work might show less cinematic experimentation but the film is enriched by the sharp and tight performances by the actors. In fact, many of the works made by those Arab female filmmakers have a strong grounding in whatever the performers have experienced. In Spring Came on Laughing, all of the performers come up with a tense and stunning confrontation among the characters, culminating in the tight and concise cut in each sequence and a film filled with energy.
Strong performance is also evidenced by first-time Jordanian director Sondos Al-Smerat in Simsim (2025), the story of a housewife who tries to get a divorce from her husband but is trapped with his demand that she must find a new wife for him. With a sharp script for a woman who wants to acquire her own freedom and lead a new life where she can take care of her daughter and mother, Simsim was awarded for best first-time scriptwriter for Tamara G Wais and best first-time actress for Saja Kilani.
There are still many other films that were screened in the festival and cannot be seen by this writer due to the time constraints. But with the aim of showcasing the first or second works of newcomers, the festival proves that there is still a way for female directors to be spotted in this region, especially with the fact that the region has faced many political upheavals during the last decades. We hope that they will cross over their domestic stories into global issues in the near future.
By Anchalee Chaiworaporn
Edited by Amber Wilkinson
@FIPRESCI2025