AIFF 2026 – The Festival Went Beyond the Frame and Cinema Continued After the Screen
At the 2026 Amman International Film Festival, “Beyond the Frame” became a call to look beyond the images and into the stories, memories and realities they contain. The Arab Feature Documentary Competition offered strikingly different ways of confronting conflict, disappearance, identity and the survival of cinema itself. Beyond the screen, conversations and encounters turned the festival into a space where cinema continued to happen.
Reflecting on the theme of the 2026 Amman International Film Festival – Awal Film, “Beyond the Frame,” one quickly understands how easily it could become a motto for our times, particularly in the violent world we inhabit: a call to look, see and live beyond our prescribed boundaries. It was indeed a fitting framework for the festival, proving far more than a curatorial slogan. Everyday screenings prompted debates, while their contexts extended into informal conversations and late-night gatherings. In a sense, the festival, under the presidency of HRH Princess Rym Ali, became both a reflection of our world and a vibrant space for sharing it.
Set within a country where history is inscribed into the landscape – from Petra’s rock-cut monuments, a place of human habitation for millennia, to the ancient Citadel overlooking Amman, where the closing ceremony took place – the festival’s concern with memory acquired an additional resonance. The setting itself seemed to echo some of the questions raised on screen: how do societies preserve their past, how do they confront loss and transmit their stories across generations? Moving between these layers of history and the contemporary life of Amman made the festival’s engagement with memory particularly tangible.
Somehow, it seemed that films did not end with their final shot, extending into conversations, debates and informal exchanges across venues into the city itself. Encounters with filmmakers, critics, jury members and festival guests repeatedly opened new discussions and perspectives, while the openness of the festival leadership, including personal conversations with Princess Rym Ali herself, contributed to an unusually accessible atmosphere of dialogue. Along with the sharing of contacts and ideas, many of these conversations will continue well beyond the festival, allowing the festival to become an extension of the screen.
This philosophy found a rich expression in the Arab Feature Documentary Competition, from which this year’s FIPRESCI Prize was selected. Rather than offering a homogeneous picture of the conflicts affecting the region, the films seemed to enter into an unexpected dialogue with one another, moving between disappearance and belonging, intimacy and war, the memory of cinema and the memory preserved by cinema.
That was particularly evident in the melancholic story of a young girl, uncomfortable with her own image and abandoned by her family at an early age, now living in a shelter. Iraqi filmmaker Zahraa Ghandour’s Flana (2025, فلانة) turns this intimate tale into a cinematic reflection on the acceptance of one’s own individuality, allowing its protagonist to imagine herself beyond the label imposed upon her: “flana”, the forgotten or missing woman. That movement from vulnerability towards self-determination finds a very different cinematic expression in Birds of War (2026, عصافير الحرب), where Lebanese filmmaker Janay Boulos and Syrian documentary filmmaker Abd Alkader Habak place their own slow, tentative love story against the background of war, displacement and political unrest. Here, too, images become a way of looking beyond the familiar representations of conflict: their relationship unfolds through messages, photographs and exchanges across social media, bringing the distant reality of war into an intimate space and transforming everyday images into fragments of a shared cinematic experience.
This relationship between intimacy and memory extended also into Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me (2025, دو يو لوف مي), which gives memory a chance to speak through the archive, reconstructing Beirut’s modern history from an extraordinary body of images, newsreels, television programmes and home movies. The Lebanese filmmaker moves freely between moments of everyday life and scenes of destruction. War becomes not only something remembered through historical events, but something embedded in the fragments of a society’s visual memory. In this sense, editing becomes another form of historical writing – and another way of resisting disappearance.
The question of what survives when cinema itself disappears leads naturally to Palestinian filmmaker Alex Bakri’s Habibi Hussein (2025, حبيبي حسين). The story of an old projectionist, whose knowledge and experience become crucial to the restoration of a movie theatre, turns the materiality of cinema into a meditation on cultural memory, dignity and rebuilding. The same dimension of cinema connects directly with Anti Cinema (2025, ضدّ السينما), by Saudi filmmaker Ali Saeed, which asks what happens to cinephilia when cinema itself is absent. By uncovering Saudi Arabia’s hidden film culture and the passion of movie lovers who grew up without theatres, the film demonstrates that the desire for cinema can survive beyond the institutions traditionally associated with it. The screen may disappear, but the memory and desire it created remain – and can, indeed, go beyond the frame.
Among the films in competition, Belgian-Syrian filmmaker Tawfik Sabouni’s The Other Side of the Sun (2026, الجانب الآخر من الشمس) – our FIPRESCI Award winner, as well as Jury Award winner in the Arab Feature Documentary Competition and Audience Award winner – offered perhaps the clearest expression of the festival’s central idea. Rather than recreating the horrors of Syria’s Sednaya Prison under the Assad regime through spectacle, Sabouni builds a cinematic language grounded in testimony and lived memory. Recalling his imprisonment, he argued that his eyes “became the camera and my brain became the hard drive”, providing an ethical foundation for the film: “It is necessary to show that people are human beings.” The film restores visibility without exploiting suffering, placing human dignity and the possibility of hope at its center.
Another defining moment came with the panel “Artivism: The Artist as a Driver of Change,” featuring actor, filmmaker and activist Khalid Abdalla and moderated by human rights lawyer Mary Nazzal-Batayneh. Reflecting on artistic practice and civic responsibility, Abdalla argued that “our weapon is culture,” suggesting that cultural work may not change reality by itself, but can provide the compass for imagining change. His words offered another lens through which to understand the documentary programme: cinema not merely as representation, but as participation, memory and civic responsibility.
What ultimately distinguished this edition of AIFF was the extent to which cinema exceeded its conventional boundaries. The “frame” became a porous space connecting images to histories, personal narratives to collective experiences, and artistic gestures to political realities. The festival’s encounters between filmmakers, critics, audiences and guests reinforced this expanded understanding of cinema as a shared, ongoing process. Beyond the Frame thus became more than its title: it described a way of understanding cinema as an art, but also as an act of resistance, that begins with images and finds its fullest meaning in conversation, encounter and shared human experience.
Paulo Portugal
© FIPRESCI 2026