Arab cinema continues to break new ground – in subject matter, in artistry, and in resonance. In the context of ongoing regional conflict, film has also become one of the most direct ways for audiences beyond the region to engage with its history, culture and, crucially, its humanity.
Closer to home, the picture is even richer. These films point to a new golden age taking shape – one defined by range rather than uniformity, and by stories that move confidently across genres and forms. Crucially, many of the most compelling works of the year are not shaped primarily for consumption by the West, but rather function as internal examinations of the past, present and future – speaking as much to current generations as to those still to come.
There have been scores of remarkable dramas and documentaries from the region this year, with more still on the festival circuit and yet to be released to the public in 2026. From among that treasure trove, the films below stand out as some of the most vital.
1. The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia)
Make no mistake – The Voice of Hind Rajab, from acclaimed Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, is the most emotionally affecting film of the year, and one of the most devastating films ever made. That’s not primarily due to the dramatisation elements – anchored by Palestinian actors Motaz Malhees and Saja Kilani’s powerful performances as the Red Crescent volunteers who take five-year-old Gazan girl’s emergency call. Rather, the soul of the film is in its reality – it’s in Hind’s actual voice, used throughout.
It’s in the gentleness with which she pleads with them to come get her before night falls because she’s afraid of the dark – the matter-of-fact tone with which she grapples with the fact that the deceased family members surrounding her in the car in which she’s trapped are not just sleeping.
No single film could cover the totality of Gaza’s tragedy since October 7, but in zooming in on one girl’s story, not only do we fully experience the unequivocal crime of her killing, but we also see the unbearable agony of what it’s like for those who were forced to bear witness, unable to stop what unfolded.
If you’re never able to watch it again, I won’t blame you – I cried from start to finish myself. But it should be seen by anyone near or far. Hind Rajab's story deserves to endure.
2. The President’s Cake (Iraq)
The President’s Cake, the debut feature of director Hasan Hadi, echoes his own childhood in southern Iraq under Saddam Hussein. At a time of severe scarcity – when sugar and flour were outright banned – children were still tasked with baking a cake in honour of the former leader’s birthday, with failure carrying real and lasting consequences. One of Hadi’s friends was expelled from school, conscripted into Saddam’s children’s army and later died.
The film draws on that memory without retelling it literally. Instead, it follows nine-year-old Lamia as she moves through her town in search of ingredients, navigating empty shelves and adults both kind and predatory, never quite sure who can be trusted. Shot with restrained naturalism and anchored by Baneen Ahmad Nayyef’s unsentimental performance, the film captures the quiet fear and warped logic of everyday life without spelling it out.
Hadi resists explanation or moral instruction. He isn’t translating Iraq’s past for outsiders so much as remembering it, allowing politics to surface through detail and texture. The result is a film that builds gently but inexorably, before landing on an ending whose force comes not from shock, but from recognition – a reminder of how easily childhood can be shaped, and damaged, by the systems that surround it.
3. Happy Birthday (Egypt)
In its early minutes, Happy Birthday, directed by Sarah Goher and co-written with Mohamed Diab, initially presents itself as a modest portrait of middle-class life in Egypt. The focus is on Laila (Nelly Karim), a divorced mother anxious about affording the birthday party her daughter so desperately wants. She shops for it with the help of Toha, her mother’s young maid – a child the same age as her daughter.
It soon becomes clear that Laila has never truly interrogated the moral implications of employing a child. As they move through shops and preparations, she is confronted with Toha’s own longing to be seen as a normal girl – her desire for affection, belonging and, quietly, to be part of the family she serves. When a shopkeeper threatens to expose her, Laila’s response is not to make things right, but to send Toha back to her village.
From that moment, the film decisively shifts. This is no longer Laila’s story, but Toha’s – as she navigates her rural home with a single, heartbreaking goal: to return to the birthday party she helped plan, for the girl she believes is her closest friend. What unfolds is a clear-eyed, unsentimental reckoning with class, exploitation and emotional blindness, one that strips away comforting illusions and leaves behind a far more unsettling truth.
4. All That’s Left of You (Jordan)
Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You is an expansive family saga that traces Palestinian life across generations, from the Nakba to the present day. Its first half is deliberately educational, laying out historical context and lineage with clarity and care, grounding the story in a foundational trauma too often flattened or ignored. But as it it goes, the film becomes a story all its own.
What makes All That’s Left of You poignant is not the questions it answers for audiences unfamiliar with Palestinian history, but the ones it opens – many of them deliberately unanswerable. It asks how far resistance can go, and where responsibility lies between those who leave and those who remain. In its final act, the film confronts the most agonising question of all: whether a mother and son should allow their child, killed by Israeli fire, to become an organ donor, even if those organs will save Israeli lives.
Some of the choices the characters make may be the wrong ones, and others are clearly regretted. But the weight of these dilemmas is more than any one person can reasonably carry – and that burden is central to the film’s argument. Anchored by Saleh Bakri and Dabis’s restrained performances, All That’s Left of You finds its power not in certainty, but in the accumulation of choices that offer no clean resolution.
5. Once Upon a Time in Gaza (Palestine)
Once Upon a Time in Gaza is not a crime thriller in any conventional sense, even if it initially presents itself as one. Set between 2007 and 2009, the film by Palestinian brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser borrows the language of genre only to quietly dismantle it, using crime, violence and performance to ask what it means to live – and to define oneself – under occupation.
What begins with two men running a falafel shop, skirting Gaza’s informal economies, soon fractures. Midway through, one of its protagonists is killed, and the film pivots towards something stranger and more revealing: the making of a low-budget action film about a militant figure, shot inside Gaza itself. That shift is the film’s key gesture. It exposes how identity is shaped, distorted and sometimes performed for survival – how resistance, propaganda and aspiration bleed into one another when life itself is politicised.
The Nassers do not flatten Gaza into symbolism. Their film acknowledges internal corruption and compromise, but never loses sight of the conditions imposed by blockade and surveillance, which hover constantly at the edge of the frame. What gives Once Upon a Time in Gaza its force is not its plot, but its accumulation of lived detail – the deadpan humour, the quiet negotiations, the sense of lives paused rather than ended. It is a film about endurance more than heroism, and about the insistence on dignity in a place where even the act of imagining a future can feel defiant.
6. A Sad and Beautiful World (Lebanon)
Directed by Cyril Aris, A Sad and Beautiful World is a long-gestating romance that uses one relationship to trace three decades of modern Lebanese history – its wars, brief periods of calm and the emotional toll of living with permanent uncertainty. The film follows childhood sweethearts Nino (Hasan Akil) and Yasmina (Mounia Akl), whose opposing outlooks – his stubborn optimism, her hard-earned pragmatism – mirror the country’s own fractured relationship with its future.
Aris frames the relationship around coincidence and reunion, leaning openly into serendipity as part of the film’s emotional logic. As Nino and Yasmina repeatedly find their way back to one another, the romance moves through shifting tones, from early lightness to increasing strain, allowing the pressures of life in Lebanon – economic instability, political uncertainty and the erosion of long-term plans – to intrude steadily on the private sphere.
Much of the film’s credibility rests on its performances. Akil brings an exposed warmth to Nino, playing optimism as both sustaining and, at times, willfully evasive, while Akl gives Yasmina a firmer, more guarded presence, grounding the relationship as circumstances grow more demanding. Together, they anchor a romance that uses familiar tropes but places them within recognisable constraints, where even the most intimate choices cannot be separated from the wider forces shaping everyday life.
7. Palestine 36 (Palestine)
Since the war on Gaza began, one refrain has been repeated again and again: this did not start on October 7. Often, the story is then traced back to 1948 and the Nakba. But as Palestine 36 makes clear, it did not begin there, either. Annemarie Jacir’s sweeping historical epic turns instead to the 1936–39 Arab Revolt in Palestine, when Palestinians rose up against British rule amid escalating land dispossession and the growing influx of Jewish settlers.
Jacir approaches the period with evident seriousness and care, weaving together a large cast that spans villagers, freedom fighters, political elites and British authorities, punctuated by archival footage. The film is beautifully shot, deeply researched and unmistakably a labour of love. At the same time, its ambition is also its limitation. By attempting to encompass so many perspectives, the narrative rarely settles long enough for individual stories to fully take hold – the villagers, in particular, feel as though they could sustain an epic of their own.
Yet to judge Palestine 36 purely on dramatic terms would miss its deeper purpose. This is a film driven as much by historical urgency as by storytelling instinct. It may only scratch the surface of a complex and often neglected chapter, but in doing so it restores vital context too often absent from contemporary conversations. As cinema, it is uneven; as history, it feels essential.
8. Hijra (Saudi Arabia)
Shahad Ameen’s Hijra unfolds as a coming-of-age road film shaped by pilgrimage, following young Janna as she crosses Saudi Arabia with her devout grandmother in search of her missing sister. Set in motion during a journey to Makkah, the film centres on a relationship defined by faith, authority and Janna’s growing awareness of the constraints beginning to close around her.
While the film loses some narrative focus in its middle stretch, it regains emotional clarity in a final act that brings grandmother and granddaughter into tentative alignment. That closing movement is strengthened by Ameen’s visual approach (which has only matured since her beautiful first film Scales) – desert landscapes held in a lyrical stillness that mirrors Janna’s inward shift. Through small, keenly observed changes in Lamar Faden’s performance, Hijra works best as a character study, capturing the moment when childhood gives way to a world far more complicated than expected.
9. Hoba (UAE)
Hoba (The Vile), Emirati filmmaker Majid Al Ansari’s return to feature filmmaking after nearly a decade, is an unusually intimate piece of Gulf horror – one that locates its fear in domestic rupture. Set largely within a single Emirati home, the film follows Amani (Bdoor Mohammad), a wife and mother whose life begins to unravel when her husband suddenly brings home a second wife, Zahra (Sarah Taibah), already pregnant with the son he has long wanted.
Rather than rushing towards the supernatural, Al Ansari allows unease to accumulate slowly. The true horror initially lies in the emotional violence of the situation itself – the shock, humiliation and disorientation of a family reconfigured overnight. When something darker begins to creep in, it feels like an extension of that trauma rather than a distraction from it. Drawing on multi-cultural genre language Al Ansari has a deep respect for, the film borrows from various horror traditions while remaining grounded in Gulf social realities, particularly the unspoken tensions around polygamy and power within the home.
What gives Hoba its force is its refusal to sensationalise either its subject or its scares. Anchored by Mohammad’s controlled, increasingly fractured performance and a commanding star turn from Taibah, the film understands that superstition and fear often thrive where emotional truths go unacknowledged. It isn’t flawless, but it is confident, culturally specific and quietly unsettling – a significant step forward for Emirati cinema, and one that lingers precisely because it feels it could have only been made in the UAE, though its themes may resonate far beyond its borders.
10. Sudan, Remember Us (Tunisia)
Directed by French-Tunisian-Moroccan filmmaker Hind Meddeb, whose work has long focused on migration and protest culture, Sudan, Remember Us documents the euphoria that swept Khartoum after the fall of Omar Al Bashir in 2019 – a moment when poetry, music and collective joy became instruments of political expression.
The film captures that hope with intimacy before confronting its violent undoing. Meddeb is careful not to centre on military spectacle, but when she does include mobile phone footage of the June 2019 crackdown, its brutality is unmistakable. What distinguishes the film is its refusal to let violence define Sudan’s story. Instead, it lingers on young activists debating their future, on the country’s long tradition of protest poetry, and on figures such as Maad Shaykhun, whose closing recitation becomes an act of preservation as much as defiance.
This isn't a chronicle of failure – it's an insistence on memory. It treats culture as infrastructure – something that survives even when political dreams are violently interrupted. It is a film determined to remember something beautiful in the face of deliberate erasure.
