san diego
arab film festival
welcome to the 14th annual
san diego arab film festival!
April 4-13, 2025
Tickets are on sale now, with individual screenings at $15 (discounted to $12 for students), 3-ticket packages for $40 and Festival passes for all 8 screenings for $80. Arabic dinners will be available each evening for $18.
Online ticket sales close the morning of the event.
Tickets will be available at the door until sold out.
The San Diego Arab Film Festival is dedicated to the memory and legacy of Stephanie Jennings, friend, comrade and activist.
lineup AND SCHEDULE
The San Diego Arab Film Festival is back for 2025 with live, in-person presentations of feature length and short films at the Museum of Photographic Arts. The festival will open on Friday, April 4, and present 8 screenings, each showcasing one feature film and one short film (except for one that has 2 shorts), from across the Arab World. Each evening, the festival will also offer cafeteria-style Arabic dinner.
This year we have decided to emphasize films from or about countries that are under attack: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Our opening and closing night features are from Palestine (including the Academy Award winner No Other Land), and each screening includes a short film from or about Palestine–including a powerful film about Gaza submitted by a filmmaker in Iran. The Festival also includes films from Egypt and Tunisia, both of which were submitted to the Oscars in the International Film category, and one from Algeria, a docu-drama about Frantz Fanon set at the beginning of the Algerian revolution.
We are excited to bring these films to the San Diego community!
Friday, April 4, 7:20 PM
Online ticket sales for this screening have closed. Tickets will continue to be available at the door until sold out.
MESSAGE
By Saeed Moltaji
A determined female reporter in a war-torn Gaza, facing poor internet conditions, decides to take all her memory cards to her colleague in the news agency building. She hopes he can send the videos. She faces obstacles along the way...
NO OTHER LAND
By Basel Adra, HamdanBallal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor
Since childhood Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community's mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation to make way for Israeli settlements. For half a decade, he has been filming its gradual erasure, as soldiers destroy the homes of families - the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. In the process, he crossed paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joined his struggle. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film was created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice. It has been nominated for an Academy Award.
Saturday, April 5, 6:10 PM
PALESTINE ISLANDS
by Nour Ben Salem, Julien Menanteau
Maha, a 12-year-old girl, is part of the final generation of Palestinian refugees from the Balata Camp. After seeing her blind grandfather faint, she imagines a crazy project: To make him believe that the Wall of Separation has fallen, thereby making a return to his native land possible.
Fariha
By Badr Yousef
"Fariha" (meaning 'Joy' in Arabic) is a short documentary about 70-year-old Fariha - a woman from Yemen - who stepped out of the limelight of a burgeoning singing career in the 80s after a series of set-backs within a male-dominated society and industry. When filmmaker Badr stumbles upon her singing in her kiosk in downtown Sana'a, he insists on following her with his camera to learn about her past.
TILKA
By Myriam Geagea
Tilka is an intimate portrait of five women navigating multiple crises in Lebanon: prolonged economic collapse, a global pandemic and the aftermath of the Beirut port blast. Najah, Tima, Rania, Fatima and Fida meet in March 2021 for an artist’s residency in the mountains outside Beirut, coming together to create an original piece of theatre.
Saturday, April 5, 8:30 PM
THE POEM WE SANG
By Annie Sakkab
The Poem We Sang is a 20-minute, color and black and white, experimental documentary that meditates on love and longing - the love of one's family and the longing for one's home, contemplated through overcoming the trauma of loss of family home and of forced migration, transforming lifelong regrets into a healing journey of creative catharsis and bearing witness. The Poem We Sang is at once deeply personal and fiercely nostalgic - a tribute to the director’s uncle my family, and an ode to their lost family home in Palestine.
Arze
By Mira Shaib
Arzé is a struggling single mother living in Beirut with her agoraphobic older sister and teenage son, Kinan. Supporting the family by making homemade pies delivered on foot by her son, Arzé knows that the business can only sustain them for so long. In a move of desperation, she steals her sister’s cherished bracelet to pawn for the down payment on a delivery scooter. But disaster strikes when the scooter is stolen, jeopardizing her only way to provide for her family. Up against a ticking clock to either find the scooter or a way to pay for it in full, Arzé and Kinan embark on a wild journey through the turbulent but vibrant, multiethnic Levantine capital in pursuit of the pilfered moped.
Friday, April 11, 7:20 PM
VIBRATIONS FROM GAZA
By Rehab Nazzal
The director offers a glimpse into the life of deaf children who live and have grown up in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip under repeated Israeli aggression. The children’s voices vividly convey how they experience the bombings, destruction, and drone buzz overhead.
FLIGHT 404
By Hani Khalifa
Days before she travels to Mecca for HAJJ, Ghada is faced with an emergency and is needed to come up with a large sum of money. She is forced to return to people from a tainted past with which she had severed ties. Will things go smoothly, will she be able to solve her problem and make it to HAJJ? Or will returning to the past contaminate her again?
Saturday, April 12, 6:00 PM
A LULLABY UNLIKE ANY OTHER
By Amini Jaffer
"M'dina" is an experimental documentary that captures everyday scenery through the lens of a foreigner in the old city in Tunisia. Life in this mystic place though it might seem exotic is a narrative as old as time: humans with their hopes and dreams...
TRUE CHRONICLE
By Abdenour Zahzah
1953, colonized Algeria. Fanon, a young black psychiatrist is appointed head doctor at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. He was putting his theories of ‘Institutional Psychotherapy’ into practice in opposition to the racist theories of the Algies School of Psychiatry, while a war broke out in his own wards.
Saturday, April 12, 8:20 PM
IS ANYONE ALIVE?
By Omar Elemawi
When a bombing destroys his house, a father gets stuck under the rubble and desperately looks for help to save his injured daughter. Inspired by true events.
TAKE MY BREATH
By Nada Mezni Hafaierh
Shams, an intersex person living as a woman, must live in the shadows. At 23, life is steeped in secrecy and unimaginable pain. Stripped of the right to exist, Shams is shunned by true love and rejected by society’s rigid norms and expectations.
Sunday, April 13, 5:00 PM
BORN A CELEBRITY
By Luay Awad
Feeling confined in his small Palestinian town and close-knit community, Kamel, a young man, embarks on a journey to discover his personal freedom and privacy.
Bassima's Womb
By Babek Aliassa
When her illegal husband is deported from Canada, Bassima, a young Syrian woman, finds herself in a difficult situation, both socially and financially. Desperately looking for a way to bring her husband back, she agrees to become a surrogate mother in exchange for a false passport. However, she soon finds out that she is already pregnant and must give up her own child.
Sunday, April 13, 7:25 PM
UPSHOT
By Maha Haji
Set against the backdrop of Gaza's enduring strife, UPSHOT tells the story of Suleiman and Lubna, a couple who retreat to an isolated farm shrouded in mist as they grapple with profound loss. Their fragile escape is disrupted by an unexpected visitor who brings a harrowing revelation from their past, challenging the delicate fantasy they've built.
A STATE OF PASSION
By Carol Mansour, Muna Khalidi
After 43 horrific days working round the clock under constant bombardment in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, emerged to find himself as a face of Palestinian resistance. This was Ghassan’s sixth and most horrific Gaza “war”. Why does he do it? Where does he find the strength to face it again and again?
Financial support is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
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KARAMA’s vision is to grow the San Diego Arab Film Festival into a major cultural event that enhances the identity, perception and understanding of the Arab and the Arab world. Doing so will require time, energy and money. You can help in multiple ways…
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