This year’s lineup platforms Arab artistry and talent.
The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026, and Arab filmmakers are firmly in the spotlight. A total of 14 works by and featuring Arab talent appear across shorts, features and documentaries, representing Jordan, Iran, Tunisia, Yemen, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan and Egypt. 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 2026.
Features
Sara Ishaq’s The Station is a women’s only petrol station in Yemen that acts as a haven for sisterhood amongst the turmoil of war. When the owner Layal’s brother faces enlistment, she devises a plan to keep him safe, which unravels in this tale of comedy, drama and suspense.
In A Whisper by Leyla Bouzid, a young queer woman returns home to Tunisia to mourn her uncle’s death, only to find his cause of death shrouded in mystery and secrets. Revealing hidden truths about her intergenerational matriarchal household forces her to look inwards and decide if she is ready to reveal parts of her own self.
Chronicles from the Siege by Abdallah Al-Khatib won the Best First Feature award at the Berlin International Film Festival this year. Al-Khatib’s fiction debut traces the daily lives of Palestinian citizens trapped in a war zone.
Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die is a cinematic letter to the late Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab. This work reimagines Saab’s 16mm archive filmed across Palestine, Lebanon and Iran between 1973 and 1983, as an ever-living space of cultural dialogue and political imagination. Layering Mohanad Yaqubi’s voice over Saab’s images, it explores the ethics of documentary making and image-making.
Furies by Rami Kodeih is a story rooted in sisterhood, and inspired by Rami Kodeih and Nora Mariana Salim’s own experiences living in Lebanon. It tells the tale of two siblings driven to desperate measures when they’re unable to afford life-changing surgery, planning to get revenge on the country’s corrupt banking system.
All That Appears Solid Is Built on Blood by Izdihar Afyouni documents the making of the mass grave in Khan Younis, slowed frame by frame, re-shot on film and soaked in human blood, honouring the precise timekeeping of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
Going Home by Kamal Aljafari films a local broadcast from a television at his parents’ home, as he wrestles with news of relatives killed in Gaza.
Documentaries
Concrete Land is Asmahan Bkerat’s feature directorial debut, and tells the emotional story of how an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family battles erasure and racism in Jordan. This exploration of familial ties and displacement emphasises the importance of home.
Short Films
Sid Elbadawi’s (Failing to Make) Documentary About My Sudanese Family sees the filmmaker initially set out to document a family holiday in the throes of a civil war, only to find the process unravels the film itself.
Mon Taxi by Meriem Sakrouhi tells the story of Meriem herself, who for years called her father every day, deciding to call him on the day after his death.
O River, We Forced You to Chew Up Their Crops by Philip Rizk intertwines three intergenerational fables based on Nubian cosmologies as they face the erasures brought by the Aswan High Dam. It follows the rupture between people, the Nile and ancestral knowledge passed down through stories.
Rami Jarboui’s 3D animated The Bird’s Placebo is made using rotoscoping, telling the story of a young man from a marginalised neighborhood in Tunis, whose dream is crossing the Mediterranean.
To the North by Amer Nasser is set in 2025, after a brief ceasefire in Gaza, as the protagonist Firas returns alone to the north to search for his sister and her family.
Fatima Wardy’s White Musk explores how tensions arise when the roles are reversed, as a young Sudanese woman suddenly becomes her mother’s primary caregiver.
Where: BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road, South Bank, London, SE1 8XT
When: 7 to 18 October 2026
Contact: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk