Film Catalogue :

Arab/Muslim World Films

Here’s a full but not yet exhaustive list of notable Palestinian/Arab, Iranian, Turkish AND Kurdish films. As stated on the accompanying page, some of the Palestinian films were made in Israel and primarily with Israeli money, but I think you have to be a bit of an ideological hardass to say that that automatically makes them unPalestinian, and since they speak of the Palestinian perspective, they are to be found here. I think that it’s also clear that the Egyptian and Iranian film industies, in particular, are much bigger than what is seen here, but of course they were not central to my focus at the beginning. Note that as of April 2026 I’ve added comments to the blog (at the bottom of the page, of course), so if you have any information about gaping holes on my list, feel free to write something.

The project started purely with me watching films from the Israeli and Palestinian sides, after which I started looking more generally at films from the rest of the Arab world, and then fairly soon I had to add Iranian films to the project. It was only much much later that I caved to the admission that Turkey is just as much part of the Middle East as it’s part of Europe or Asia. It’s a complicated place, after all, and that makes it çok veeeeri interesting, Abi. Having come to this a bit later on, the efficiency with which I hoovered up Turkish films, directors and actors was much higher than at the beginning, when I was working much less systematically. Hence the Turkish list (at the time of writing these words) has ended up the longest of them all. But that’s legitimate in any case, as Turkey has a much longer history of making films than most other parts of the Middle East, with the exception of Egypt and Iran. It’s quite an interesting history, in fact, which reflects the country’s history in very striking ways.

Having come so far by now, and having dug so deep into Turkish cinema history, I’m conscious that I’m going to have to come back round and look at some historical Egyptian and Iranian cinema at some point. As I understand things, the stories are a bit different. Egyptian cinema is the original cinema of the Middle East, big enough to have been influential beyond the Arab world back in its early days. Political stagnation caused it to decline somewhat in influence, and it’s now somewhat overshadowed by cinema from elsewhere in the Arab World, most notably Lebanon. Iranian cinema is a slightly different story, having blossomed much later.

At the time that you’re viewing this page, a total of 303 films are listed here.

Palestinian films from/about Gaza and the Occupied Territories

I used the word “normal” in the corresponding Israeli section, to describe films which depict everyday life, situations which are perhaps not specifically Jewish, and whose themes could therefore be adapted into another cultural context. Most notably, the majority of those Israeli films contain little or no reference to Arabs. Slightly misleading for me to describe that as normal. It’s of course delusional to pretend that you can ignore what’s going on, but it’s a delusion successfully marketed to the Israeli public ever since construction of the wall began. Conversely, it is virtually impossible for a Palestinian film to contain no references to Israel, because normal life for Palestinians is the life under Israeli occupation. So there is a substantive difference in that regard at least. All that said, why fuss too much over this word? Evidentally nothing is normal in the whole situation, seen from outside, and yet this is also normal life, seen from the side of either of these two concerned parties.

Strictly and rather technically-pedantically speaking, The Stranger isn’t a Palestinian film, being about Arabs in the Golan Heights, who of course traditionally identify as Syrian rather than Palestinian. That identification has apparently been fragmenting since the Civil War started in Syria, but of course the official political status of the place in the eyes of the so-called international community remains that of 1967/1973. The film is also not directed by a Palestinian, but since it’s set in Israeli-occupied territores I’ve put it in this section.

Film poster: Chronicle of a Disappearance

Films about history up to 1948 and about exile

Very hard stuff. These films are all documentaries, apart from Farha, a film which caused quite a controversy when Avigdor Lieberman (an Israeli politician who was once considered far right, but has come by the time of writing to be considered a relative moderate compared to some characters in the Israeli government - “relative” is of course very very relative in this case) condemned Netflix for streaming the film in Israel. Uncomfortable viewing for him, no doubt, but I’m here for honest and open discussions.

Children of Shatila (dir. Mai Masri, 1998) Watch on Youtube (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (dir. Mai Masri, 2001) Watch on Youtube (Seen? 👁️✔️)
A World Not Ours (dir. Mahdi Fleifel, 2012) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
1948: Creation & Catastrophe (2019) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
Farha (فرحة) (dir. Darin J Sallam, 2021 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Palestine 36 (فلسطين ٣٦) (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2025 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)

Film poster: Frontiers of Dreams and Fears

Film poster: 1948: Creation & Catastrophe

Palestinian films from inside the 1948 borders

A very small section, of course - simply because most productions made inside those borders are of course Israeli productions. I’m assuming that at least some of the funding for some of these films was Israeli, but they’re very much Arab directed and Arab-acted. Only one of these films, Ajami, has a Jewish Israeli character foregrounded in the story. Fair enough - it’s about carving out a space. The most interesting thing to note about these films is the enormous diversity of Arab identities that you have inside a relatively small geographical space (just like Lebanon) - from Nazarene Christian Arabs in Wajib to tent-dwelling Bedouin in Sandstorm.

Wedding in Galilee ("Urs al-Jalil" - عرس الجليل) (1987) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Ajami (عجمي) (dir. Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani; 2009 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Sandstorm ("Asifat Ramliya" - عاصفة رملية ; "Sufat Khol" - סופת חול) (dir. Elite Zexer, 2016 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Junction 48 (ג'נקשן 48 ; "Mafraq 48" - مفرق 48) (dir. Udi Aloni, 2017 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Wajib (Duty - واجب) (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2017 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)

Palestinian short films (from the Occupied Territories, and from exile)

Netflix is a bit annoying in a couple of ways, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, but I really do have to commend them for the selection of Palestinian films which they make available, and there are a few little gems here which you would really struggle to find anywhere else. Several of these films come from Mahdi Fleifel. I’ll have to devote a post to his works at some point. Three of those, Xenos, A Man Returned and 3 Logical Exits follow up on his longer feature, A World Not Ours, tracing the often desperate life decisions of an acquaintance from the Lebanese refugee camp in which the feature film is shown.

Like Twenty Impossibles ("Ka'inana Ashrun Mustaheel" - كأننا عشرون مستحيل) (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2003) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Xenos (dir. Mahdi Fleifel, 2014) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Ave Maria (2015) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
A Man Returned (dir. Mahdi Fleifel, 2017) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Bomboné (2017) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
The Crossing ("Al-'Ubur" - العبور) (dir. Ameen Nayfeh, 2017) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
A Drowning Man (dir. Mahdi Fleifel, 2018) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
3 Logical Exits (dir. Mahdi Fleifel, 2020) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
The Present ("Al-Hadiya" - الهدية) (2020) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)

Egyptian and other North African films

At the moment of writing, I have still watched fewer than half of these films, simply because Israel-Palestine (by extension Lebanon, and by further extension to that: Iran) have been the priority so far. I’ll have more to say later, but anyway the work of Mohamed Diab (Cairo 678 and Clash) is pretty interesting. Also, The Unknown Saint, a Morrocan film, is good if you’re in the mood for something quirky, away from the eye of the Middle East storm. Tunisia, the original home of the Arab Spring, has made an interesting contribution since then. Although only a very short film, Aya (available on Netflix last time I checked) is well worth searching out. It’s heartbreaking, but it says a lot in little or no time at all. Of course I can’t mention Tunisia and Morocco without also acknowledging their later neighbour, Algeria. And when we talk about those three countries together, we are also going to be soon talking about France. Hence you’ll find films in this section which also turn up in the Arab (et al.) Diaspora section at the bottom of this page.

Cairo Station ("Bāb al-Ḥadīd" - The Iron Gate - باب الحديد) (dir. Youssef Chahine, 1958) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
Chitchat on the Nile ("Thartharah fawqa al-Nīl" - ثرثرة فوق النيل) (1971) (Seen? ⏳❌)
Tea in the Harem (dir. Mehdi Charef, 1985) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Mummy (1999) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Days of Sadat ("Ayaam al-Sadat" - أيام السادات) (2001) Watch on Youtube (grainy and jumpy film, but anyway, it's there) (Seen? ⏳❌)
Chouchou (dir. Merzak Allouache, 2003) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Cairo 678 (٦٧٨) (dir. Mohamed Diab, 2010 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Rock the Casbah (dir. Laïla Marrakchi, 2013) Trailer (Swedish subs on the trailer - I can't find one with English, sorry) (Seen? 👁️✔️)
As I Open My Eyes (À peine j'ouvre les yeux) ("Ala Hayat Ayni" - On my Eye - على حلة عيني) (dir. Leyla Bouzid, 2015) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Clash ("Eshtebak" - اشتباك) (dir. Mohamed Diab, 2016 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
The Flower of Aleppo ("Zahrat Halab" - زهرة حلب) (dir. Ridha Behi, 2016) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Undercover Egypt (2016) (Seen? ⏳❌)
Aya (آية) (2017) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Yomeddine (Judgement Day - يوم الدين) (dir. Abu Bakr Shawky, 2018) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Papicha (dir. Mounia Meddour, 2019) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Unknown Saint ("Sayid al-Majhul" - سيد المجهول) (dir. Alaa Eddine Aljem, 2019 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
The Hunt for Gaddafi's Billions (2021) (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du caftan) ("a-Zraq al-Quftan" - أزرق القفطان) (dir. Maryam Touzani, 2022) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)

Film poster: The Hunt for Gaddafi's Billions

Film poster: The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du caftan)

Film poster: As I Open My Eyes (À peine j'ouvre les yeux)

Films from/about Iraq, Syria and Lebanon

I’ve already written one very long post about three of these films (West Beirut, The Insult and Memory Box), and a shorter post about one other (Costa Brava, Lebanon). I’ll be coming back soon enough, and at the time of writing these words (September 2024) it’s looking ever more likely, alas, that Lebanon is going to get foregrounded again. I’ve never been to Lebanon, but somehow it very much lives inside me. As for the films about Iraq and Syria, God help me… So much violence, so much sadness. After realising that I needed a Turkish section, and then realisting that I needed a Kurdish section, I added quite a few Iraqi Kurdish films, which you’re seeing listed here.

Notice that I’ve added some Saddam Hussein era propaganda films at the top of the list. I’m watching them so that you don’t have to. I will surely suffer in the act, but the idea is that they’ll give me something to think about for a post.

Films from/about the Arabian Peninsula

I gotta be honest. Before I started this project it had not occurred to me that there was the possibility of a film coming out of Saudi Arabia. I was wrong. There are two lovely Saudi films on this list - Wadjda and Barakah Meets Barakah. However, I should point out that they were made before MBS’s hostile takeover. I imagine the possibilities for expression are severely reduced now from what they were when those films were made. If the sportswashing is working on you, you’re probably not reading this anyway. Two of the films are about a conflict which we have mostly forgotten in the last decade - Yemen. I don’t know anything about it, other than that the Houthis are there. I’ll try to learn something.

Don’t get the wrong idea, by the way, about one of the films on this list. I’m WELL aware, from pre-reading about it, and from watching only two minutes of it, that Al-Kameen is a propaganda film. I’m going to watch it alongside Hunger Ward, a warts and all documentary about the war in Yemen. Theeb was made in Jordan, but it’s very much about the Hejaz, and is pretty much the only film on either list which harks right back to the pre-1948 historical roots of the Israeli-Arab conflict (albeit that it’s only a quite oblique reference).

Wadjda (وجدة) (dir. Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Theeb (Wolf - ذيب) (dir. Naji Abu Nowar, 2014) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Barakah Meets Barakah ("Baraka yuqabil Baraka" - بركة يقابل بركة) (dir. Mahmoud Sabbagh, 2016) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Bitter Rivals: Iran and Saudi Arabia (2018) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Hunger Ward (dir. Skye Fitzgerald, 2020) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Al-Kameen (The Ambush - الكمين) (2021) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)

Film poster: Bitter Rivals: Iran and Saudi Arabia

Films from/about Iran

Apologies for any inconsistent transliteration of the Farsi - I just lifted them from Wikipedia, and there’s more than one convention for the transliteration of Farsi. What to say? As we stand, it all starts (and for some, it finishes) with Iran versus Israel. Apart from talking about the mad apocalyptic geopolitics between the two regimes (and, crucially, NOT the peoples), and the crappy internal politics of both countries, Iran produces beautiful and deeply contemplative films which are worth watching for their own sake and in their own right, not only for the political or historical commentary. Iran has justly become considered, over the course of several decades, to be one of the treasure houses of artistic cinema.

Iranian films can be a bit strange for the beginner. The apparently reduced stylistics and lack of artifice can leave the Western viewer expecting something which they will not find there. Early on in the project I wrote one short post about one of the more typical films, Children of Heaven, and then came back two years later to write a much longer post about a larger selection of Iranian films, some of which fall outside that characterisation. We can say that the films of Asghar Farhadi are a decent way into Iranian cinema. They combine Iranian cinematic aesthetics with themes that are recognisable enough for a Western audience.

Note that you can in fact find quite a few of these films, in full, on YouTube. I just want to say that I’ve added the links here, but that I have absolutely no idea about whether there are copyright issues. If the links don’t work for you, then very possibly there was an issue with that film, but I rather guess that the situation is similar to that pertaining to a lot of Russian films which you can easily find on YouTube, and that whatever copyright law exists is pretty flexible for these movies. It’s also possible, in some cases, that because of the censorship in Iran the makers decided to put the films on YouTube for free, to provide an easy way for people to find them (albeit that it’s of course not easy at all in Iran these days to get onto YouTube). I just don’t know. There’s little point expecting super HD video quality, or amazing sound. Nor do I have any idea if the subtitles will always be consistent or anything close to accurate!

It took a bit of digging to find some films, of course, and especially the older pre-revolutionary ones can be challenging to locate. Many of them are on YouTube, as you see, but often without subtitles, so there’s more research involved to get everything you need to watch. It was watching and writing about Mani Haghighi’s A Dragon Arrives! that took me back to the pre-revolutionary period. At many points in that film, Haghighi references his grandfather Ebrahim Golestan’s Brick and Mirror. Because I got obsessed, in order to write properly about Haghighi’s film I had to go back and watch Golestan’s. After that, curiosity was piqued, and this blog post by Andrej Chovanec was very helpful.

Attentive readers will notice that there are plenty of films listed here from the 1970s. It seems that there was plenty of output, despite the restrictions of the late Pahlavi regime. And then production falls through the floor in the 80s. The reasons should be obvious enough. Restrictions from the Islamic regime which turned out to be no more liberal, and of course in many ways significantly less so, than those of the Shah’s guys, caused many filmmakers to give up and leave Iran, or just to go silent. On top of that, there was of course the small matter of an eight-year-long murderous attritional war with Iraq. Unsurprising that resources were not available for contemplative film-making, even if the government had been more open-minded than it was. The real wonder of it was that the film industry was able to blossom so quickly after the war ended. Two films made in 1987, while the war was still ongoing - Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home?, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist - had a lot to do with that.

Final note - I’ve also added a few films to this list which were made in the West, and which will be at least one or all of the following

hostile to the regime of the Islamic Republic
orientalising (hence also to be found in the corresponding section)
dehumanising

Let it be clear, then, that I’m not especially endorsing these films (even if they’re not all baaaad films), but just that since they are about Iran they belong here alongside some far more worthy films.

Film poster: No-one Knows About Persian Cats

Film poster: Just 6.5 (AKA Law of Tehran)

Film poster: The Music Man (AKA Santouri)

Film poster: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Film poster: Zero Days - Nuclear Cyber Sabotage

Film poster: Where is the Friend's Home?

Turkish films

I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually have to add this section, especially once I started talking about the intersection of the Middle East with Europe, on both sides that is and not only from the long historical Jewish angle. It’s actually a bit of a cliché to point out that this is a country with one foot in Europe and one foot in the Middle East, so this section certainly complements the section of films relating to diaspora communities in Europe. As for the name of this country, sorry Recep, I’m not going to play your silly word game, and I’ll continue to call it what I’ve always called it, in my language, not yours. Unintentional double meanings make a language funny. Taking offence at double meanings only reveals how brittle your national ideology is. To be discussed.

NGL - like all the others on this site, it’s really hard to find some of these films! And when you do find them, getting them with subtitles - synced! - is probably harder. It’s very similar to the situation with Iranian films, though. There are quite a few on YouTube (EVEN with subtitles, occasionally), and you can also find them on dodgy Russian sites, but there of course you’re not likely to be getting them with subs. The difference with the Iranian films is that in the latter case many of the filmmakers are very intentionally making the films available on as many sites as they can find, because their films are banned in Iran. They’re also fairly keen, it seems, to ensure that the films will have subtitles, so that they get noticed outside Iran. In the Turkish case, I guess the dynamics are not the same. Whatever we say about the state of politics in Turkey, it’s not the same as Iran, and films being available so much on free sites comes down to commercial streaming sites not picking them up, and to the fact that it’s still kind of the Wild West as far as copyright is concerned. Needless to say, though, I can’t guarantee that a link that I’ve found today will still be working tomorrow!

Film poster: The Girl with the Red Scarf

Film poster: Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

Film poster: The Edge of Heaven, AKA Auf der anderen Seite

Film poster: Head-On, AKA Gegen die Wand

Film poster: Die Fremde, AKA When We Leave

Film poster: Takva - A Man's Fear of God

Film poster: Almanya - Welcome to Germany

One interesting little footnote to this list: I spent a fair bit of time, as you see if you browse a bit, looking for interesting interviews with film directors from all sides. The search hasn’t been completely exhaustive, as life is too short, but I found a lot. It’s quite interesting to note that it was much harder to find interviews with Turkish directors in English or any other Western European language for that matter, than it was for any of the others - Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs. For relatively obvious migratory reasons, there’s almost as much in German as in English, but there really isn’t much. Especially interesting to contrast with how much attention is shown to the Iranian film industry. You can find dozens of interviews with Makhmalbaf, Ghobadi, Farhadi and other leading directors, but to take a very significant Turkish example, I can’t find a single interview in English, French or German with Zeki Demirkubuz. I probably will find something eventually, but I’ve seen nothing on YouTube so far.

Kurdish films

And then, finally (let’s assume!), inevitably, there had to be a Kurdish section. I knew that it wouldn’t take long for this to become a necessity as soon as I added the Turkish section. For transparent geopolitical reasons, all the films in this section will be found in other sections - Turkey, Iran, Iraq/Syria and maybe also the diaspora section at some point.

At the time of creating this section, I’ve only watched a couple of the films listed, and both of them come from the Iranian side of those mountains. The first of them, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards is one that I watched many years ago in the cinema, more or less on its release. It pretty much blew my mind. The second one is Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses, one of several Kurdish-themed movies that he has made. Ghobadi is himself Kurdish, so that makes plenty of sense.

After adding the Turkish section, researching fairly exhaustively to the point where I had identified 40-odd films that I wanted to have a look at, and then getting to the point that it was time to look for Kurdish-made films, I found things to be in an interesting position. Kurdish language and culture have of course been far more ruthlessly suppressed over the years by the Kemalist and then by the strange post-Kemalist weirdo Islamist Turkish state than in Iran and (post-Saddam) Iraq; and it turns out, as with the Iranian case, that that’s kind of a benefit to my project, because some Turkish-made Kurdish films are freely available on YouTube. Just as in Iran, I’ll assume, this is to get around Turkish government restrictions. So most (maybe all?) films by Kazim Öz are easy enough to find online, with subtitles. However, the Turkish state’s presumed obsession with making sure that some films don’t get seen may have worked against me in the case of one film, which I really want to see - Hüseyin Karabey’s Come To My Voice. It’s pretty weird. The trailer, with English language subtitles, is there on YouTube, but I can’t find the film itself anywhere. Maybe on some streaming site that I’m not aware of, but the only place that I’ve found it on sale was on the German Amazon, and irony of ironies, the whole point of a film being made in the Kurdish language is completely negated by the Germans dubbing the voices. Not many things annoy me more than that, and I’ll say that it’s one of the things that Britain gets right compared to Germany and Latin-speaking countries of Europe. That, and the famous sense of humour. Maybe not much else, alas.

Films from/about the Middle East Diaspora

The deeper I go with all this, the more intertwined it all becomes. Jewish history very obviously demands a separate section for films coming from the diaspora in Europe, America and elsewhere, but it didn’t occur to me at the time of creating that section that I would eventually need to create a complementary section for the other side of the ledger. Becoming a big fan of the Belgian/Spanish/Moroccan actress Lubna Azabal changed this. More than anyone else I’ve come across, she straddles the Mediterranean, equally comfortable playing a Lebanese in Incendies, a Palestinian (I think) in Paradise Now, a Moroccan in The Blue Caftan and Rock the Casbah, and French or Belgian in Tel Aviv On Fire and Amal (pictured here). I haven’t seen her in something Spanish-speaking, but I suppose that must exist.

Amal (no spoilers) was the tipping point, bringing me to the understanding that there’s a whole category of films that deal with the complex issues relating to assimilation and Islamic radicalisation in European societies. Colonial history dictates that France and Belgium (by extension from France, I assume) are the crucible for this as far Arabs are concerned, but not only France and Belgium of course. Layla M (pictured) comes from the Netherlands, for example. And then if you’re going to talk about this subject you’ve also got the enormous, complicated Turkish (and don’t forget also Kurdish) community in Germany, which in turn means that I’m probably going to have to start talking about Turkish and Kurdish films as well, doesn’t it? There’s already some Kurdish content, coming mainly from the amazing Iranian-Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi. Aaaaaah, it’s getting bigger and bigger. And then, in turn, do I add films relating to Muslim communitiees in Britain? Primarily from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Can we stretch geography to suggest that either of those are in the Middle East? Obviously we cannot. But do the issues of the Middle East impinge on their political and cultural attitudes towards Britain and the West in general, and are there analogies to the Arab communities in France and Belgium and the Turks in Germany? Blatantly they do, and clearly there are, yes.

Orientalist Films

Not going to recapitulate Edward Said here. Over to you, if you’re not familiar, to go away and read in detail all about what Orientalism is. Let’s summarise it, though, by taking these three definitions from wiktionary.org:

(art, architecture, literature) The tendency to represent eastern subjects, to assume stylistical characteristics original of the East, especially in 19th century Europe.
(countable) An Eastern word, expression or custom.
(postcolonialism, capitalized) A patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies.

It’s of course definition #3 that I’m engaging with here, and Said’s criticism is/was that Western scholarship in the nineteenth century, and through into the twentieth, developed a way of representing the East that was ostensibly looking academically at the East, but was in reality insidiously developing tropes that were to be used to diminish the stature of Eastern cultures and thereby to argue that Western domination was inevitable. That’s the argument in a nutshell. Every form of racism has its own set of founding principles, and they’re all a bit different from each other.

The obvious comment that follows is that “the East” is a very big part of the world, and different versions of Orientalism have been employed for each case of Western domination over a certain Eastern culture. This being the Middle East, though, we are referring here to Orientalism in its original form, as it was developed initially in France to curate and subjugate what was then known more often as the *Near East. That would be the East that stretches across Western Asia from Anatolia, Egypt and the Levant through Mesopotamia and Iran, all the way to Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush, and that means that Britain’s discourse had to catch up soon enough with France’s as the nineteenth century colonial race ran its course.

Some of the films that I’m listing here are not BAD films. They can be entertaining, within their own limitations. The Man Who Would Be King is the guilty pleasure that I’ll admit to. I still enjoy it, despite its obvious dodginess by today’s standards. Some of the films here might also be well intentioned (which is why they also appear in the section below this one). What all the films on this list have in common, to a greater or a lesser degree, is that they can all be critiqued within the Orientalist framing. Some of them, most notably The Mummy, fall into the classic “so good it’s bad” category. Some, however, are egregious flaming acts of artistic self-immolation. Looking at the poster floating to the right of this paragraph, which I won’t even name, and which is EASILY one of the worst high-budget Hollywood films that I’ve ever seen.

At the time of creating this list, I haven’t watched many of the films here. There are a couple that I watched in the past, but I’ll leave them marked as unseen until I’ve watched them again with a critical eye, with the goal of course that I’ll write a post or two about them eventually. It may be that I end up deciding that some of them are not so bad, and don’t belong in this section, and vice versa it may be that some films from the “Worthy Western” section end up here.

Notice, also, that there are some films here that overlap with the Biblical half of the section on Biblical and Zionist Mythology that I added, at the same time as this one, to the section on Israeli and Jewish-themed films. We can argue (and we don’t have to agree) that there’s a conscious self-orientalisation (in the unlikely form of Charlton Heston) that coincides with the creation of the State of Israel, which needed Oriental credits in its early days, before it metamorphosed into the much more obviously Middle Eastern place that it is today. That’s another very complicated box for Pandora to open, and I think that I’ll be forced to revise my thinking about this taxonomy more than once. However, I’m going to set this up for now, just to get started.

The Ten Commandments (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
Ben-Hur (dir. William Wyler, 1959) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann, 1962) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, 1962) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Man Who Would Be King (dir. John Huston, 1975) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1981) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Not Without My Daughter (dir. Brian Gilbert, 1991) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Aladdin (dir. Ron Clements and John Musker; 1992) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Mummy (1999) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Hidalgo (dir. Joe Johnston, 2004) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Ridley Scott, 2005) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Rendition (dir. Gavin Hood, 2007) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Kite Runner (dir. Marc Forster, 2007) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (dir. Mike Newell, 2010) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Beirut (dir. Brad Anderson, 2018) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Aladdin (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2019) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)

Worthy Western Films

Not as many complicated words needed here as in the previous section. These are films made in “the West” - working definition: “Europe and North America”. Apologies to Latin America, but those continents are of course what count in this power relationship. In contrast to the films in the section above, these are films that reflect more humbly about the way that they represent the people who inhabit the Middle East, trying to avoid the classic stereotypes. They don’t all get it right, and certainly not all of the time, which is why some of them do inevitably also find themselves in the Orientalist section. A harsher critic than me will probably dump every single one of them in that bucket. It’s common in these times to condemn to eternal cancelation anyone or anything that only once infringes a limit, but I prefer to assume decent intentions before rushing to total condemnation.

Appropriate, then, that the list begins in 1966 with one of the first genuinely post-colonial European movies - The Battle of Algiers - made while the dust of the Algerian War had hardly even settled. At the time of creating the list, I haven’t actually watched it yet, and I’ve got a looooooot of Iranian films to get through, but of course I know its reputation. It will be seminal when I get around to examining the films in this section. From more recent times, there’s a lot of Afghanistan and Iraq content, of course. Not that the United States has quite got over itself at the time of writing (April 2026). What’s it gonna take?

The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) Watch on Youtube (Seen? ⏳❌)
Three Kings (dir. David O. Russell, 1999) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Syriana (dir. Stephen Gaghan, 2005) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Rendition (dir. Gavin Hood, 2007) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Kite Runner (dir. Marc Forster, 2007) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Entre les murs (The Class) (dir. Laurent Cantet, 2008) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Incendies (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2010) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Camp X-Ray (dir. Peter Sattler, 2014) Trailer (Seen? ⏳❌)
Beirut (dir. Brad Anderson, 2018) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Limbo (dir. Ben Sharrock, 2020 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)
Shoshana (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2023 - Interview) Trailer (Seen? 👁️✔️)