The London Film Festival, organised by the British Film Institute, opens its 70th edition on Wednesday 7 October with a programme of major productions, independent films, documentaries and shorts, while political and social issues feature prominently through stories and characters that avoid direct rhetoric.
251 works from 88 countries in the 70th edition
Arab representation extends beyond the films being screened to the juries, in a programme addressing war, displacement, racism, economic collapse, migration, family relationships and the effects of modernisation projects on local communities. Palestinian-Jordanian director Asmahan Bukeirat’s Land of Cement is competing in the documentary competition, which awards the Grierson Award for feature films of artistic and social value.
Palestinian films confront displacement and the erasure of identity
The film follows the life of a Palestinian Bedouin family of African origin living in Jordan, facing displacement, racism and attempts to erase its cultural identity. It links the family’s experience to what Palestinians in Gaza are enduring through questions about the meaning of home and the fear of losing one’s place.
It also focuses on the ability of family ties to shield individuals from some effects of being uprooted, amid pressures threatening their existence, identity and connection with the surrounding community. Palestinian director Abdallah Al-Khatib is taking part with The Diaries of the Siege, after winning the Best First Feature award at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2026.
Al-Khatib divides his film into five interconnected stories following Palestinians trapped in an area under military occupation, where basic needs, including securing food and a safe birth, become daily tests linked to survival. In The Revolutionaries Never Die, Palestinian director Mohanad Yaqubi returns to the films of the late Lebanese director and journalist Jocelyne Saab.
Yaqubi presents the documentary, a Palestinian-Belgian-Qatari co-production, as a cinematic letter to Saab, using footage she shot on 16mm film in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran between 1973 and 1983. The war in Gaza appears directly in the short film Everything That Appears Solid Is Built on Blood, by directors Izdihar Afyouni and Ghazaleh Khoshgoozaran.
The film uses footage documenting preparations for a mass grave in Khan Younis, before slowing the images frame by frame and re-filming them on cinema stock submerged in blood. The London Film Festival described it as a tribute to Palestinian journalists who documented the war in Gaza and preserved images of the victims in the face of killing and attempts to erase evidence.
The film is screened as part of Rhythms of Resistance, a programme bringing together films examining the effects of colonialism and political violence, and the possibility of turning memory into a tool for reclaiming history. Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari appears in an experimental programme with two shorts, Return to Homeland and Masao Adachi Takes a Picture of the Passport.
Lebanese cinema addresses collapse and family relationships
The programme examines repression and dispossession, as well as forms of solidarity that cinematic images can produce. Palestinian director Amer Nasser presents To the North, while Moroccan director Maryam Sqalli takes part with My Taxi, in which she imagines calling her father the day after his death. From Lebanon, director Rami Kadi turns the country’s financial collapse into a thriller framework in Furious.
The film follows two sisters planning to rob a bank after the banking system denied millions of Lebanese people access to their savings. The need to fund an essential operation for one of the sisters drives them to devise a plan to take revenge on the institution that held their money.
Kadi and writer Nora Mariana Salim drew on their experiences in Lebanon when developing the film, but address the economic crisis through action, suspense and the relationship between the sisters rather than offering a direct explanation of its financial and political causes. The crisis thus becomes the backdrop to two characters’ attempt to recover their money and secure treatment.
Lebanese director Ramzi Bashour presents his first feature film, Hot Water, following a Lebanese university lecturer living in the United States who sets off on a journey with her teenage son after he is expelled from school. The mother tries to balance work pressures, her effort to quit smoking and her son’s recurring problems, before his father offers to take him in.
The mother and son begin a long journey that confronts their relationship with questions they had been unable to face at home. The film moves away from direct political images of the Arab migrant, focusing instead on a more intimate experience involving motherhood, identity and the generational divide, and on the journey’s revelation of tensions long deferred between the two characters.
Yemeni women confront war and forced conscription
Yemeni director Sarah Ishaq presents The Station, set amid the war in Yemen at a women-only petrol station run by a character named Layal. The station gradually becomes a place where women gather to talk and laugh, and take a temporary break from the pressures the war imposes on their lives.
When Layal’s younger brother faces the prospect of conscription, she begins preparing a plan to protect him and keep him from the front. The film combines comedy, drama and suspense, placing women at the centre of the story without confining them to the role of war victims. Ishaq wrote the screenplay with Nadia Aliwat, while Yemen, Jordan, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Qatar share production credits.
Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid takes part with In a Whisper, starring Aya Botruea, Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass and Marion Barbeau. The story begins with a young Tunisian woman returning home to attend her uncle’s funeral, but the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death raise questions about the secrets the family keeps.
As the protagonist seeks to discover what happened, she is forced to confront the fact that she too is hiding part of her life from those closest to her. Bouzid uses the family home and the relationships among its women to address inheritance and the fear of acknowledging the truth, in a drama linking individual freedom to family and social pressures. The film is a French-Tunisian co-production and is screened in Arabic and French.
In the shorts programme, Egyptian director Philip Rizk draws on three inherited stories from Nubian folklore in O River, We Have Forced You to Swallow Their Crops. The film examines the changes brought by the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the resulting severing of the connection between people and the Nile, the land and knowledge passed down through generations.
Rizk uses oral storytelling and the sound of water to record the history of communities that bore the cost of major modernisation projects. Sudanese cinema is also represented by White Musk, directed by Fatima Wardi, and A Failed Attempt to Make a Documentary About My Sudanese Family, directed by Sayed El-Badawy.
Tunisian director Rami Jarboui takes part with the animated film The Imaginary Bird’s Medicine, while the programme includes Kohl, directed by British filmmaker Aisha Boujeloud. These works add themes of family, memory and identity to the Arab programme, alongside the Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni and Tunisian works shown in other sections.
Arab representation extends to the juries, with British-Egyptian actor and producer Amir El-Masry chairing the First Feature Competition jury, which awards the Sutherland Award for the most original and imaginative debut directing.
El-Masry won a BAFTA Scotland award for his performance in Limbo, was selected by the British Academy for its Breakthrough Talents initiative in 2020, and was included by Screen International in its Stars of Tomorrow list in 2021. The festival opens with Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman.
The film revisits the final period in the life of Scottish actor Ian Charleson, as he prepared to play Hamlet while facing AIDS and approaching death. The festival closes on 18 October with A First Time, starring and directed by Jesse Eisenberg.
Julianne Moore stars as a woman given a new opportunity to discover herself when she joins a local theatre company, bringing the 12-day 70th-edition programme to a close.
