This year’s lineup platforms Arab artistry and talent more than ever.
The 69th BFI London Film Festival runs from 8 to 19 October 2025, and Arab filmmakers are firmly in the spotlight. A total of 19 works by and featuring Arab talent appear across shorts, features and documentaries, representing Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan and the UAE. From intimate portraits to expansive epics, the programme probes love, grief, loss and community with striking originality. These are the Arab films to watch at the BFI London Film Festival 2025.
Features
A Sad and Beautiful World, directed by Lebanese director Cyril Aris, charts a thirty-year love story set against Lebanon’s turmoil, with Mounia Akl and Hasan Akil exploring the pull between staying and leaving. From Morocco, Maryam Touzani presents Calle Malaga, starring Spanish icon Carmen Maura in a Tangier-set drama about home, memory and belonging.
It Was Just an Accident (Yek Tasadef Sadeh) from Jafar Panahi is a critically acclaimed road thriller that reunites two men after a traffic incident, gradually unfolding into an incisive look at life under authority and the cost of defiance.
In Palestine 36, renowned filmmaker Annemarie Jacir revisits the 1936 Arab Revolt against British rule, with a cast led by Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, Jeremy Irons, Liam Cunningham and Dhafer L’Abidine. Tunisian director Erige Sehiri unveils "Promised Sky," a heartfelt testament to migration, sisterhood, and resilience, following three Ivorian women as they forge new lives in Tunisia.
Jordanian filmmaker Zain Duraie presents Sink (Gharaq), a tender drama on the outskirts of Amman, where Nadia, a mother of three, supports her teenage son Basil through undiagnosed mental illness. Iraqi director Hasan Hadi makes his feature debut with The President’s Cake, the story of nine-year-old Lamia whose mission to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein becomes a bittersweet survival odyssey under sanctions.
From Kaouther Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab reconstructs the real-life story of a five-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, blending documentary with re-enactment. Emirati director Majid Al Ansari returns with The Vile, a psychological drama that studies a marriage pushed to breaking point when trust is lost.
Documentaries
Khartoum, directed by Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim “Snoopy” Ahmad and Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, interweaves testimony and dramatised footage to follow five Sudanese residents displaced by war, preserving memory amid upheaval.
In Singing Wings by Hemen Khaledi, a Kurdish mountain village serves as the stage for a poignant tale of care and migration, as 78-year-old Khadijeh tends to her husband and nurses a wounded stork, while her daughter struggles far from home.
With Hasan in Gaza by Kamal Aljafari builds a reflective film from rediscovered footage shot in 2001, shaping an elegy of loss, endurance and the persistence of images.
Short film programmes
Mapped Out Futures presents My Blood is Palestinian (Ana Dammi Falastini) by Jay Scanlan-Oumow and Omar Ismail. Set in Newcastle upon Tyne, it follows a young Palestinian navigating diaspora, belonging and memory, and how separation from one’s roots shapes daily life.
Palestinian filmmaker Said Zagha delivers Coyotes, a 2025 neo-noir set in Palestine. Inspired by true events, it centres on a surgeon driving home after a night shift whose encounter with soldiers on a West Bank road alters her future.
British-Iraqi writer-director Amrou Al-Kadhi returns with Original Sin (2025), a raw, moving portrait of a Muslim mother and her drag queen child, tracing generational trauma, tenderness and the language of femininity.
Roots and Branches features Chikha by Zahoua Raji and Ayoub Layoussifi. This Moroccan short tracks 17-year-old Fatine as she weighs an inherited artistic legacy against a more conventional path with a boyfriend who rejects her heritage.
Anatomy of Place, Sites of Becoming includes Radius Catastrophe by Lebanese director Jad Youssef. Along Lebanon’s northern coastline, an alien agent is sent to examine a murder, opening a lens on violence, ecological collapse and the daily realities of state neglect.
Cadences of Refusal spotlights Daria’s Night Flowers from Maryam Tafakory, a Farsi collage-film drawn from archival cinema that drifts into a hypnotic meditation on desire, censorship and resistance. Morning Circle by Basma Al Sharif will also screen at the BFI London Film Festival 2025, reframing a kindergarten ritual to interrogate repetition, image and power, exposing colonial legacies, liberal mythologies and the politics of enforced separation.
GO: Visit whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff for more information.