This has been a middling year for Middle Eastern cinema. With Palestine continuing to dominate the region’s cultural discourse and festivals growing increasingly narrow-minded in their selections, critics and audiences alike have found it difficult to get excited about films that offer little surprise and more of the same habitual subjects.
There’s a growing disjunction between local audiences for Middle Eastern films and their international counterparts.
Middle Eastern viewers crave seeing their lives represented truthfully, insofar as censorship allows.
The incessant stream of familiar fest-bait stories about poverty, war, illegal migration, and toxic patriarchy has little of value to them.
International viewers, by contrast, are often drawn to the region precisely because of their familiarity with such representations.
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The decades-long indoctrination of identical narratives and unchanging archetypes into the minds of international viewers has left many with little capacity to accept and enjoy straightforward genres with social commentary delivered in a purer form than that typically catered…