The 10 best Middle Eastern and North African films of 2024

In one of the most telling scenes from Kamal Aljafari's Palestinian conceptual documentary, A Fidai Film, an Israeli soldier parades the theft of press clippings, books, and photos from across the Arab World that documented different facets of Palestinian life.

All of the material is taken to Israel in an all too familiar attempt to erase Palestine's collective memory. 

The depicted Israeli raid is rooted in an undeclared fear that these documents, which they regarded as propaganda, may harm Israel's reputation or undermine the Zionist cause - a fear that acknowledges the power of the image and the word in challenging perceptions and convictions. 

Forty years later, Israel is no longer concerned with Palestine's pictorial memory.

The genocide of Gaza, the October 2024 war on Lebanon, and the recent raids on Syria have been played live in front of the world to no avail.

In 2024, the image no longer holds any power or meaning. People have grown terribly distrustful of the image, of the word, of numbers, of the unadulterated truth.

In a post-truth world, everything can be manipulated, photoshopped, cropped, and fashioned into whatever narrative people wish to subscribe to. 

But cinema still terrifies.

Cinema still unsettles, intimidates, and places that feared context to these images and words and numbers.

Cinema is dangerous, a thorn on the side of fundamentalists and fascists and the deliberately benighted.

And in 2024, the intellectually emancipated Middle Eastern film has proven to be the most dangerous of them all. 

Over the past 12 months, Middle Eastern films have been intensely scrutinised, debated, dismissed, celebrated, and in many cases, shunned by the mainstream establishment in both the West and the Middle East.

Not since the Arab Spring has Middle Eastern cinema felt so pertinent, so immediate, so insubordinate - be it in their inventive, challenging forms or truculent politics. 

As Israel's wars continued to rage on, the West remained clueless on how to deal with Middle Eastern cinema all throughout the year.

Alexis Bloom, the South African director of The Bibi Files pinpointed that the mainstream western film establishment is no longer interested in polarising and urgent political films, leaving exhibitions of Middle Eastern films in Europe and the US in the hands of few but valiant small distribution companies like the newly-formed Watermelon in the US and passionate film houses such as Wolf in Berlin. 

The best of the year's Middle Eastern cinema captured the zeitgeist of the global culture in a fashion that continues to elude a mainstream art primarily fixated on commerce and diversion. 

In 2024, the gap between the mainstream and the independent has grown so wide it's now practically unbridgeable. 

The increasing synergy between Egypt and Saudi Arabia continued to conflate, resulting most notably in Welaz Rizk 3, the highest-grossing Egyptian film in history which doubled as a grand commercial for Riyadh. 

Egypt produced a slew of middling entertainments that provided a distraction from the gruelling economic woes. Saudi, on the other hand, continued its industrial development, inaugurating the biggest film and TV studios in the Arabian Gulf while solidifying its position as the most lucrative film market in the region. 

The rest of the region's commercial cinema failed to strike a chord with viewers, hampered by the twin forces of self-censorship and the lack of funding from states that continues to treat cinema with caution and hostility.  

Each of the following ten pictures faced colossal hurdles to see the light of day; each has strived to attract a wide audience; and collectively, they represent a brave act of defiance against totalitarianism, against the oppressive imperatives of the market, against the debilitating norms of an industry desperately striving for relevance.     

So, without any further ado, here are the top most dangerous Middle Eastern films of 2024.  

10) Perfumed with Mint

The directorial debut of gifted Egyptian cinematographer Muhammad Hamdy is an atmospheric allegory about a group of men battling to contain the inexplicable sprouting of mint from their bodies with the use of hashish.

The aroma of the mint attracts foreboding shadows hunting down the defenceless folks who have lost all will to fight back.

Entirely conceived in a series of long, smouldering still frames that avidly nods to the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, Hamdy's intrepid, rebellious work flouts the rules of classical storytelling long associated with Egyptian cinema, conjuring up a disorienting mist of a film about fear, trauma, and the overbearing stupefaction that has taken over the broken generation of the 2011 Revolution.  

9) Song of All Ends

Similarly evoking the films of Costa in his mythification of marginalised populations, the debut feature of Italian photographer turned filmmaker Giovanni C. Lorusso is an impressionistic, plotless monochrome portrait of a family residing in the rundown Lebanese refugee camp of Shatila.

The limited action of the film is largely comprised of the family's quotidian existence whose stillness cloaks simmering grief derived from the loss of their youngest daughter in the 2020 Beirut explosion.

Steering away from the habitual fetishisation associated with the depiction of poverty in Middle Eastern cinema, Lorusso's stark, haunting tone poem is an elegy of invisible, forgotten lives momentarily hanging onto a collapsing world.

Shot in 2023, the recent evacuation of the camp in the wake of Israeli strikes on Southern Lebanon last October imbues the picture with an additional tint of pathos. 

8) East of Noon

"Once upon a time, there were frightened people. They were so frightened that their imagination escaped."

Thus begins the sophomore effort of visual artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy, a musical fable about a young musician aspiring to break free from his poverty-stricken, autocratically-ruled fictional small town.

Shot in black and white and laced with disparate influences – from the colloquial Arabic poetry of Salah Jahin and Egyptian musicals of the 1940s, to the use of political symbolism in the Brazilian Cinema Novo, East of Noon is the year’s most formally inventive picture: an anti-realistic political parable examining one the most pressing questions facing Middle Eastern art today: is art a means of rebellion or a mere tool in the arsenal of autocracy to sedate the masses?

Like Perfumed with Mint, Elkoussy employs fantasy to work around censorship, illustrating in the process that political cinema can still manage to be produced in the most tyrannical of systems. 

7) From Ground Zero

In the aftermath of 7 October, veteran Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi lent cameras to a group of 22 amateur Palestinian directors to document and reflect on their daily hardships in Gaza amidst the mounting Israeli aggression.

The result is a miracle of a film: a highly singular anthology of short films seeping with pain, despair, hope, and ultimately resilience shot by aspiring artists whose fate remains in peril.

Traversing diverse genres - from animation and fantasy to social realism and verité – and varying in tone and sentiment, From Ground Zero is a rare portal into the lives of ordinary Palestinians as they toil to fathom and adapt to the inescapable death and destruction surrounding them.

The Palestinians of From Ground Zero are the numbers the world has kept a blind eye on; the innocent lives entrapped in an inferno they can't get out of.

The splatter of optimism, of perseverance, fashioned by the Gazan women filmmakers as a form of dignified resistance makes for some of the most powerful moments in any film this year, challenging what cinema is and what it could be.  

6) A Fidai Film

Veteran experimental Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari has conjured up a fascinating oeuvre out of reclaiming the Palestinian collective memory by reappropriating historical footage and resurrecting the Palestinian pictorial presence that has been wiped out by the Israeli colonisers.

Culled from rare footage stolen by the IDF during the Lebanese Civil War in 1982, A Fidai Film is similar in intention and method to his 2015 feature, Recollection, but is more expansive in scope and angrier in pitch: a railing cry against a history that been stolen and distorted, a history that routinely went by unchallenged since 1948.

Punctuated by the lyrical ruminations of the late great writer Ghassan Kanafani, A Fidai Film is a dense if playful and stirring film that questions our naive belief in the veracity of the image while exposing the hazardous role of narration: a simultaneous act of disruption and self-affirmation against time, against violent depletion, against fate. 

5) Who Do I Belong To

Tunisian-Canadian Meryam Joobeur delivers on the success of her 2019 Oscar-nominated short, Brotherhood, with the striking debut: a supernatural mystery about an ex-Isis fighter returning to his northern Tunisian home, with an enigmatic burqa-wearing wife, before a series of murders shakes up the harmony of his village.

A genre-subverting serial killer pic conceived as a naturalistic reverie similar in look and feel to the mediative work of American master Terrance Malick, Who Do I Belong To has been sloppily compared to Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters.

Joobeur’s film, however, is not another redundant study of the Islamic State; Who Do I Belong To is an affecting, earthly family tale about the colossal burden of motherhood, the unchecked force of reckless masculinity, and the devastating loss of innocence.         

4) The Bibi Files

Technically not a Middle Eastern production, but this incendiary expose by Alexis Bloom of Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption case and its connection to Gaza and the burgeoning war in the region, has been fundamental to the grander Middle Eastern narrative of 2024.

Produced by Oscar-winning American documentarian, Alex Gibney, and helmed by the Emmy-nominated South African Bloom, the film is largely comprised of the unseen police interrogation footage that have been leaked to Gibney in the spring of 2023.

Packed with interviews with the prime minister's former aides, friends, and co-workers, Bloom weaves an epic Shakespearean narrative stuffed with sex scandals, bribery, and rampant corruption; a nihilistic account of alcoholic wives and deranged sons and abused subordinates.

The violent addiction to power, caustic self-rationalisation, and bottomless moral decadence are some of the themes Bloom tackles with remarkable vigour and exactitude.

When all is said and done, Bloom ultimately reminds us that Gaza is not merely Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas, it is Netanyahu's demonic battle for self-preservation.  

3) My Favourite Cake

Mohammad Rasoulof's overrated Cannes winner The Seed of the Sacred Fig has been the most buzzed-about Iranian of the year, vastly due to its reductive politics and oversimplified morality.

Standing in contrast to Rasoulof’s future Oscar nominee is the third feature of Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, an achingly gentle, adroitly subtle comedic drama about the erupting romance between a lonely, ageing, middle-class widow and the elderly cab driver she accidentally encounters.

Unfolding over the course of a single day, Moghadam and Sanaeeha pose a question seldom considered in any Iranian film prior: Can two elderly people have an intimate sexual relationship in a country like Iran where private space is permanently policed?

The sensual scenes of wine consumption, the brief depiction of the Woman Life Freedom protests, and the appearance of the lead actress without a veil in the film have led the filmmakers to receive a travel ban that was not overturned with the arrival of the new self-branded reformist Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. 

2) No Other Land

No other film has managed to shake up the mainstream film establishment in 2024 more than this hugely acclaimed documentary that traces the unlikely friendship between an Israeli journalist and a Palestinian activist fighting in vain to prevent Israeli army-backed settlers from overtaking his family’s West Bank home.

Directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, a collective of young Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, No Other Land caused furore after it earned the best documentary award at the Berlinale, with the mayor of Berlin going as far as accusing its directors of antisemitism.

For those who remain apologetic to the Israeli polices, No Other Land emerged as a bonafide headache: a revealing record of the atrocities committed by the settlers under the protection of the Israeli army and the systematic, racist injustices committed toward a defenceless Palestinian population discarded and forgotten by the rest of the world; a document of a besieged, battered Palestine unconnected to Hamas or Gaza that existed long before October 7.

Unsettling, enraging, and tremendously moving, No Other Land has beaten the odds to become the biggest Middle Eastern pic of the year.

It's currently shortlisted for the Oscars and a surefire bet for next month’s nomination. Unsurprisingly, it remains without distribution in the US and Germany. 

1) To a Land Unknown

In a year governed by Palestinian stories, the debut narrative feature of the award-winning Danish-Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel was the most supreme Middle Eastern cinema released this year; a gritty tale of Palestinian refugees from the Shatila camp tussling to flee their Greek purgatory to the titular illusionary western European haven.

An extension of his 2014 short, Xenos, Fleifel mixes neorealism with noir elements in a film that is part thriller, part buddy drama, and part an unfiltered snapshot of Athens’ underbelly – a large den populated by junkies, pimps, and hustlers.

Most significantly, To a Land Unknown is a homage to the 1970s American dramas, particularly Midnight Boy, whose two protagonists – memorably played by Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight – Fleifel’s antiheros are modelled after.

Commendably devoid of any sense of victimisation, the biggest feat of Fleifel’s humanistic tour de force is the agency it gives his young men to be whoever they are: hustling junkies, headstrong hoodlums forever thrust in a quixotic quest to find a home they can never attain; deeply flawed men endlessly caught in a surreal battle of survival.

And by appropriating his two protagonists to Hoffman and Voight’s Rasto and Joe, Fleifel has created Palestine’s own cinematic icons – an act of great compassion, of love, that may prove to be as enduring as the Hollywood legends.