In this monthly column, we explore the latest productions from Arab and international cinema, offering a guide that combines introduction and criticism as it surveys new films on the big screen, from popular entertainment to art-house cinema across every genre.
Fog of Gunpowder
Written and directed by: Saad Tahaitah
Country of production: Saudi Arabia
The idea for Saad Tahaitah’s documentary Fog of Gunpowder came during preparations for his cousin’s wedding, when the groom’s father sought to revive a tradition that had been absent from the tribe’s celebrations for nearly three decades: al-midqal, linked to festivities and martial displays in the Asir region of south-western Saudi Arabia.
Al-midqal is a choreographed traditional performance historically associated with both warfare and celebration. Men stand in rows wearing the distinctive janbiya dagger, one of the most recognisable motifs of Gulf and Bedouin heritage, while carrying traditional matchlock rifles. They raise the weapons into the air, leap in unison and fire charges of gunpowder in a ritual expression of courage, strength, and hospitality. The tradition is closely associated with the mountainous region known as Rijal al-Hajar, home to tribes including Bani Shahr, Bani Amr, Bani Al-Asmar, and Bani Al-Ahmar.
From an intimate family occasion, Tahaitah draws out a broader meditation on collective memory, asking what becomes of a tradition when its practice is interrupted, and what that rupture means for people and place. He weaves the historical into the contemporary and the personal into the concerns of the wider community, continuing an approach already evident in his earlier films on Al-Qatt Al-Asiri (a mural or fresco art form from the region) and the memory of Asir.
Fog of Gunpowder, which won the Golden Palm for Best Documentary at the most recent Saudi Film Festival, is the young director’s fifth film. All have been in documentary cinema, including personal and autobiographical forms. His return to the genre reflects his fascination with its capacity to move between reality and imagination, particularly through the hybrid form of docudrama. Tahaitah has acknowledged the freedom this kind of storytelling allows.
He combines historical fact with dramatic reconstruction, including imagined dialogue, and draws on fellow villagers and family members to perform the roles. In doing so, he seeks to recover the spirit of the place as part of the cultural and social memory that shapes collective identity.
The film’s dramatic structure revolves around four principal characters representing three generations, including one of Tahaitah’s friends, born a year after the tribe’s last midqal performance. Alongside the groom’s father is the grandfather, who urges the younger members of the family and tribe to take an active part in the wedding, both to honour the couple and to acquaint themselves with a heritage they never experienced.
His uncle was the first person to bring a video camera into their community and use it to record family occasions, among them al-midqal celebrations. Tahaitah relies heavily on this footage to reconstruct the history and ceremonial traditions. His uncle became the first person to document that period, even though preserving it for posterity had never been his aim.
You Don’t Belong Here
Written and directed by: Florin Șerban
Country of production: Romania
You Don’t Belong Here is Romanian director Florin Șerban’s return to the international festival circuit, 15 years after his feature If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. Șerban’s latest film won the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the recent Locarno Film Festival, with the jury praising its “writing, singularity of vision, and exceptional command of cinematic language,” and giving a special nod to its young lead, Teodor Butănescu.
The film is a psychologically complex drama that explores racism and fraying paternal authority. Widower Marius (Adrian Văncică) is the chief medical officer at a small-town hospital. He believes that he has achieved a measure of moral and social stability, including a quiet life with his teenage son, Ioan, but that certainty unravels when Ioan is accused of involvement in the brutal murder of an elderly Roma man.
It exposes the fragility of Marius’s understanding of his relationship with his son. As Marius begins watching Ioan more closely, he discovers a hidden nocturnal life in which the teenager roams the streets on a motorbike with a group of young men, carrying out racist assaults and vandalising minority property, influenced by extremist ideology.
Șerban uses long takes to sustain the tension between father and son while accommodating the wider ensemble and crowds moving through the streets. He uses carefully composed visual spaces to convey their estrangement. In the house, they are shown at opposite edges of the frame, a wall forming a literal barrier between them. Beside a river, they again stand apart, as water pours from a nearby drainage pipe. The image suggests the depth of what each continues to conceal from the other.
We follow the conflict largely through the father’s perspective, against the background of a social order in which excuses carry little weight. That order is upheld by the town’s notables, including Marius, as the embodiment of an ageing code. He is proud and shows contempt for his son, as though the boy’s crime threatens the aura of social respectability he has built around himself.
This becomes particularly apparent in his conversations with a police officer friend and in the class-bound vision they share of a world in which everyone knows his place, even when the result is the triumph of the powerful and the crushing of the weak. In this world, even the distinction between victory and defeat begins to disappear. Everyone, in the end, seems equally adrift, a group having lost their place and who, as the title suggests, do not belong here.
The Last House
Screenplay: Matthew Robinson
Directed by: Louis Leterrier
Countries of production: France, UK
In The Last House, now streaming on Netflix, French director Louis Leterrier moves away from the supernatural worlds and action cinema he has long been associated with and enters more philosophical territory, examining the strangeness of human impulses and their capacity to change under extraordinary pressure, such as when survival is at stake. Although Leterrier works within the conventions of horror and science fiction, the film reaches beyond dystopia to examine the darker, more ignoble side of humanity beneath its idealised image.
The story centres on a family of four: the parents (Wagner Moura and Greta Lee) who live with their son and daughter. One morning, they awaken to a terrifying reality: their house has been completely sealed by an invisible and mysterious physical force that prevents them from leaving (in one sense it echoes Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which likewise revolves around a household of father, mother, son and daughter, but the idea of parasitism assumes a very different form in the two films).
The family initially assumes their ordeal will last a few days, but days become weeks, then months, before a temporal leap reveals that years have passed, the children have grown older, and the house is now a laboratory of survival. The screenplay grows less concerned with the unknown force holding them captive and more with the family's psychological and emotional erosion, as its members devise increasingly primitive ways to survive and communicate with neighbours.
As the rain outside intensifies, unidentified creatures begin to appear, lashing at the windows with enormous claws whenever they catch sight of someone inside, so the family keeps the curtains drawn, deepening their isolation. Electricity fails, followed by the gradual disappearance of other resources and services.
As conditions deteriorate, the family dog runs out of heart medication, forcing the father to end its suffering before freezing the meat, in case their food runs out. The act quietly foreshadows the possibility that one of them may eventually meet the same fate. The film offers a bleak view of human instinct under extreme pressure, suggesting that an act regarded today as unthinkable may one day become conceivable.
Sudan’s Forgotten Films
Screenplay: Suhaib Gasmelbari
Directed by: Suhaib Gasmelbari and Katharina von Schroeder
Countries of production: Sudan, Germany, Qatar
Films can acquire new lives as circumstances change, and the Sudanese documentary originally titled Sudan’s Forgotten Films is a striking example. A newly updated version has recently aired on Al Jazeera as Sudan’s Forgotten Archive, coinciding with the death of one of its central figures, Benjamin, the guardian of the film archive, who died on 5 August. His death gives the film fresh and painful resonance.
To watch it now is to confront the wound of Sudanese memory and identity with unusual immediacy, at a time when the devastation of continuing war threatens both. The documentary follows two older men, Benjamin and Awad, whose shared journey spans four decades as they devote themselves to preserving and restoring more than 13,000 rare film reels in Sudan’s National Film Archive, a collection regarded as one of the largest of its kind in Africa.
The film unfolds like a delicate visual elegy. Faced with the passage of time, climate, humidity, and bureaucracy, the two friends try everything to preserve the archive and do so without salaries. A painful disparity exists between the extraordinary value of these reels and the neglect surrounding them. Some contain material for which no other copies exist. Each film reel traces human experience, history, and social transformation, often extending far beyond Sudan.
