In this feature, we offer an overview of what’s new on the big screen, spanning both mainstream and arthouse films across all genres, while also revisiting titles from the archive of classic cinema.
Hijra
Written and directed by: Shahad Ameen
Production countries: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, UK
The backbone of this film is the journey across Saudi Arabia undertaken by a grandmother, Sitti (played by Khairia Nazmi) and her 12-year-old granddaughter, Janna (played by Lamar Faden), as they search for Janna’s 18-year-old sister, Sara, who has gone missing on their way to Mecca. Yet Hijra does not frame the journey as deliverance or rescue, nor as a simple movement from A to B, but as a departure from ready-made definitions, towards an intellectual reworking bound up with women’s lives and the limits placed on their freedom.
Five years in the making, it was written and directed by the Saudi filmmaker Shahad Ameen, and marks her first realist feature after several works exploring fantasy worlds, most notably Scales, released in 2019. Hijra premiered at Venice last year, and the Saudi Film Commission selected it as the country’s submission for the Academy Awards.
The story unfolds during the Hajj season, a setting the film uses both dramatically and visually as a gateway to discovering the diverse Saudi landscapes and cultures, including cities such as Medina, Jeddah, Tayma, and AlUla. Although much of the film is set in open spaces, Ameen repeatedly tightens the frame around the grandmother and the child, whether through visual emphasis or through geometric compositions. The effect is quietly insistent, a symbolic nod to the constraints imposed on women.
In this respect, Hijra does not abandon the familiar framework of generational conflict. Its dramatic structure rests on an established triad: a grandmother who embodies inherited authority, two granddaughters divided between conformity and rebellion, and a clash of values and visions around the body, freedom, and the meaning of life.
What distinguishes Ameen’s approach is not the invention of the conflict but the way she shapes it. Pushing Sara away from the centre of events leaves the space open between two poles that are starker and more resonant. At one is the grandmother, a guardian of memory nearing the end of the road. At the other is the youngest granddaughter, on the threshold of adolescence, who is just setting off.
For that reason, they are often seen moving towards one another in a relationship of striking intimacy, founded on parallel understanding rather than confrontation. It reads as a tacit acknowledgement that both stand at the same edge, one looking at the world from its far end, the other preparing to enter it with complexities beyond her imagination.
The Fakenapping
Screenplay: Ahmed Amer, Abdulaziz Al-Essa
Director: Amin Al-Akhanch
Production country: Saudi Arabia
One of Telfaz11’s latest productions, The Fakenapping recently premiered on Netflix before receiving its first festival screening at the Red Sea International Film Festival.
Both director and screenwriters give the characters ample room in a cast led by Mohammed Al-Dokhi, one of the rising faces of Saudi cinema, together with Abdulaziz Al-Sukairin, Abdullah Al-Durais, Abrar Faisal, and Saeed Al-Owairan, a retired footballer, making his first on-screen appearance.
The main plot centres on Sattam (Al-Dokhi), a father separated from his wife who finds himself crushed by debt, with the lenders soon threatening his life. Alongside this is another predicament, revealed through his relationship with his only daughter and his efforts to keep his debts from her. It is a last attempt to preserve the image of the father in the eyes of a child who chose to live with him rather than with her mother, despite the harshness of his circumstances.
As events gather pace, he kidnaps a businessman for ransom, but this causes him further problems, not all of which are without humour, as a chain of dramatic ironies and misunderstandings unfolds, not least when the hostage turns out to be none other than Sattam’s miserly father—the very man he first approached for help, and who refused.
Although the film’s reference to the father-daughter bond does not extend beyond the opening scenes, it still establishes an emotional counterpoint that Sattam lacks in his relationship with his own father, particularly as he too grew up between separated parents. Unable to command the material advantages his father enjoys, he relies on cunning, adopting other forms of presence and care.
This comes through clearly in the opening scene, where he stands in a shop wearing a parrot mask, carrying out one of the social media challenges his daughter has set him. It may be a mocking and humiliating moment, but it remains his fragile means of connection—the only one he has.
From the Ashes: The Pit
Screenplay: Haifa Al Sayed, Maryam Al Hajri
Director: Abdullah Bamajboor
Production country: Saudi Arabia
Once again, the makers of From the Ashes are betting on audience momentum after the popular first instalment two years ago proved to be a hit across Arab and international markets. Now, the film returns with a sequel, now streaming on Netflix. It follows the intersecting fates of three heroines, Mona, Mashael, and Heba (Aseel Morya, Moudi Abdullah, and Wafaa Wafi).
They are secondary school students at the heart of a tense, suspense-driven drama with a screenplay rooted in real events. The Pit tries to enter the private, hidden worlds of teenage girls, touching on their dreams and failures. The first film’s plot hinged on a school fire in Jeddah, but the sequel attaches to no single incident. Instead, it blends several true cases to serve the dramatic structure, with a clearer tilt towards symbolism, embodied in the pit that everyone is warned not to fall into.
