My Film Watchlist

Maybe it’s a bit solipsistic and self-referential to do this, and certainly not necessary, but then again there might be someone out there, other than myself, who is interested to see this list, and to know how many films I’ve seen. The total currently stands at 316. In any case, even if no-one else cares, it’s a good way for me to have some kind of retrospective on what I’ve seen up to now. So why not?

Films are listed in approximately the order that I have watched them, with ratings/rankings, initially out of ten (more on the development of those here and here), and pure emotional reactions represented by emoji. The ordering at the start is absolutely not guaranteed to be 100% accurate, especially not in the second block, where my earlier attempts to keep track of what I was watching got eaten by a dog at some point. Still, the first block probably does more or less reflect the chronological order that I watched things, and the later blocks have been carefully logged.

OK, so starting here, with the first mad surge. If you look carefully at the links here, you should notice that the colours are almost reliably alternating between Israeli/Jewish and Palestinian/Arab films. That was the dogma at the beginning. If you look very closely, though, you’ll see that there are a couple of runs of blue (Israeli) links. That can be explained, however. Even in those cases I was doing my best to alternate. The Syrian Bride and Lemon Tree turned out to be directed by an Israeli, Eran Riklis (hence in blue), but I absolutely didn’t know that at the time and both films are looking at things very much from an Arab perspective, so I can say that I was being faithful to my principles.

69 films in this section.

I picked an arbitrary cutoff point here. There was some kind of transition round about this time from strictly alternating between the Israeli/Jewish and Palestinian/Arab perspectives. I think I had served my time, after all, and felt comfortable relaxing that strict rule. This is also the point where I started adding Iranian films to my viewing list.

Also at this point, you can see that I started breaking my ranking system. I suddenly felt that confining myself to scoring films out of ten wasn’t working any more, so I broke out of that, like Jack Nicolson slipping out of a straightjacket. The more crazy I became about the project, the crazier the scores became, reflecting my emotional reactions to films. I’m not reviewing them for the Guardian, so it’s fine. Best to think of my ratings as having the same degree of rationality as Donald Trump’s nocturnal lucubrations on social media.

67 films in this section.

Something strange happened here. Well, it wasn’t strange at all. I just stopped. I stopped watching films, and stopped writing posts. I had clearly reached a point of complete saturation at the end of several very intense months. Also of course a few other things took over for a while. Life does tend to go on. I very clearly remember watching the first fifteen or twenty minutes of Junction 48, and thereafter watching no more films from the Middle East for at least half a year, and probably a bit more than that. It’s not any reflection whatsoever on that film, by the way. It’s a very good one, and when I did finally start watching again that was the film that I watched first, picking right up from where I’d left it.

These films were watched over a fairly long period in the spring/summer of 2025, without any particular thematic focus, without the same intensity of that half-year period in 2023/24, and not aiming towards any blog posts. I was going back over some films that I had seen in the past, while discovering a few new ones in a fairly aleatory way. The films that stood out to me from that time were:

• Monsieur Klein, which is clearly a classic but which I had never come across, somewhat to my surprise.
• Incendies, with an AMAAAAAZING performance by Lubna Azabal.
• Amal and The Blue Caftan, ditto. Azabal is really fantastic.
• Synonymes and Ahed’s Knee - more of the same heavy dissident Israeli soul-searching from Nadav Lapid
• Limbo - something which is somehow completely different from the rest of them, while talking about the same issues and traumas. It’s also one of the most charming and deeply touching films that I’ve seen on the whole journey, and includes a cameo appearance by the wonderful Qais Nashef, and you can’t go wrong with that.

17 films in this section.

The Turkish takeover: one day I said to myself that this project made no sense if I continued to exclude Turkey (sörry, Recep, that’s wöt I call it) from the project. It wasn’t an intentional exclusion. Turks may bicker about their geopolitical place, but it’s a bit ridiculous to say that they’re not just as much tied to the Middle East as they are to Europe, Russia and Central Asia. This makes them very interesting, and I decided that it was time to embrace, rather than avoid, the mission creep. So I ended up with a Turkish list which was approximately the same length as the Iranian one until the Iranian list expanded. The Turkish list may come back to the same length as the Iranian one eventually, and that seems about right. Similar populations, intertwined histories, and relations with The West which are different but equally fascinating.

The big difference is that Western critics and film buffs are all over it when it comes to Iranian films. In January 2026 one of the first people that the Western press turned to for comment about what was going on in Iran was the dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who happened to be outside the country on a bit of a world tour. Likewise, after the Americans and Israelis unleashed hell on Iran at the end of February 2026, they were all scrambling to find out what he had said. He hadn’t said anything, but there was a statement from Asghar Farhadi, which they poured over. He hadn’t said much himself - just that it’s ordinary people who are always the first to suffer in war.

By contrast, how many film buffs in the West know about the weird twenty-year-long personal conflict between Zeki Demirkubuz and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey’s two most significant directors in the 21st century? Answer: not many, I believe. Whatever happened between them is not obviously political, but for sure it’s sociologically interesting. They were friends, and actually helped each other out on earlier films, but then, suddenly in 2006, they were enemies, and neither has shown any sign of letting it go. Having learned about this strange business (Read all about it!↗︎), I watched all of their films, up to 2018, in chronological order, to try to get some insight into what had happened.

The truth is that I didn’t end up very much wiser. It’s pretty obvious, if you watch Inside, Demirkubuz’s film from 2012, who’s bugging more about this stuff, and I suppose it’s only jealousy in the end. Ultimately I think it’s the fault of the same Western film critics and festival curators, who spend so much energy on Iranian cinema, with nothing like the same level of interest in Turkey. As a result, there’s only the one BIG Turkish director who gets lauded at those events, and that’s Ceylan. Not surprising, maybe, that Demirkubuz hasn’t taken it well. Mind you - if you watch his films, you’ll understand that he’s perfectly capable of complicating things in his own mind.

I didn’t actually rate any of the Ceylan or Demirkubuz films while I was watching them, as I wanted to take them all in as one block, without reacting individually to each film. So I’m giving them numbers post-hoc. There are only two films that I’m reacting to with exponential emotional ratings

• Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, which I had actually watched several years earlier, and which revealed more the second time
• Demirkubuz’s Envy, which I think goes deep into his own psyche, and also features an extraordinary performance from Nergis Öztürk

I also gave super-emotional ratings to both of Pelin Esmer’s films that I’ve seen. Watchtower, in particular, being at the beginning of this part of the journey, got all the way inside me.

This really was deep research. Because of the relative lack of attention to Turkish cinema compared to Iran, I had to do a lot of digging to find films in all kinds of weird places, and then had to find subtitles for them, some of which I am STILL trying to sync. This is WORK, guys.

There’ll be plenty for me to write about these films eventually, but only when I’ve found the energy to go back and watch the remaining thirty-odd Turkish films. Meantime, as you can see, a couple of Iranian films crept in during this time, and it was precisely with the conscience that I had been neglecting Iran that I turned in that direction at the end of this period. Notice also that one more film that crept into the list here is Ridley Scott’s abominable, contemptible stinking heap of orientalist SHITE, Kingdom of Heaven, previewing the probable eventual addition to the catalogues of a section on Western films about the Middle East - be they good, bad or awful. Watching Palestinian and Israeli films back to back for months inures you to cogntive dissonance, but still it’s hard to reconcile the guy who made Blade Runner with such low grade bollocks.

46 films in this section.

Note that the last film on that list, with a seismic rating of 7.99, is in fact a film about an actual earthquake. Sorry if that’s triggering to anyone.

Having watched 40+ Turkish films in the space of little more than two months, I felt obliged to turn towards Iran. I had compiled a massive list, and hadn’t watched much more than a dozen of them. Time to attack that gap.

“Attack” - maybe not the right choice of verb in the circumstances. It’s really been a total coincidence that my Iranian film watching period fell at the same time as first the horrific events inside Iran at the beginning of 2026 and then the American and Israeli attacks that are blowing up the world economy as I write (28/3/2026). It really wasn’t planned like this, and I do have to say that it’s been difficult to push away the crazy 24-hour news about Iran and to enter the world of Iranian cinema in a more meditative mode. The films are only getting ticked off quite slowly right now. I’ll come back and write a bit more here when I’m ready.

I suppose I like to mix things up as I move along this journey, and I’ve done something different here. After watching, and then trying to write about, Mani Haghighi’s A Dragon Arrives! I was taken back to some early, pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, in the form of the 1963 (-ish) film Brick and Mirror. Although I do have a few equally old films queued up elsewhere, I haven’t been so far back into the past yet on any of the other lists.

After watching Brick and Mirror, and its near contemporary The House is Black↗︎, and having just watched some of the most recent Iranian films on my list, such as It Was Just An Accident, Opponent and Reading Lolita in Tehran, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to watch the films simulataneously backwards (i.e. from the most recent) and forwards (from the oldest), interspersing with randomly chosen ones from the middle. So IF you look carefully (from #214 onwards 🤓), you should notice that slow progression going on. I had to skip some of the older ones, as I either still hadn’t been able to find them, or hadn’t yet found decent subtitles for the rudimentary files that I had been able to get from YouTube.

It’s of course pretty strange watching some of the pre-revolution films in the knowledge of what came after. Downpour↗︎ is a good example. Honestly and truly - and I’m really sorry to say this to the likes of Martin Scorsese↗︎ - while watching I was comparing it to the kind of forgettable black and white British comedy that I used to find my Nana watching on a Wednesday afternoon, or even at some points to a Carry On film↗︎ (harsh, maybe), BUT when I got to the end (and honestly, I was wishing for it)…. I did understand the point. This film is treasured with nostalgic reverence among Iranians, because it features all the things that the joyless mullahs banned from their lives after the revolution. It’s iconic more than anything because it only survived thanks to the director, Bahram Beyzai, holding onto one very basic print of the film after all the other existing copies had been destroyed by the Islamic regime. Having got it out of the country, it was then lovingly restored. As a result of everything that I just wrote, I was very confused about what rating to give it, so I kind of caved in on a lame compromise.

However, after saying all that I just said about Downpour, which may be blasphemous to some lovers of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, I WILL SAY that The Cow↗︎ is an AMAAAAAZING, timeless and transcendent work of art. Iranian cinema’s reputation for greatness is richly deserved, and Dariush Mehrjui was one of the greatest among them. The Cow is said to be the film that saved, or at least preserved, Iranian cinema after the revolution, because Khomeini↗︎ himself had seen and approved of it. It had actually been banned immediately upon release by the Shah’s regime, because it showed rural poverty too honestly for their liking. Although the ban was lifted after a couple of years, it continued to be viewed with suspicion as being a vehicle for subversive left wing political allegory, but Mehrjui himself insisted that it was primarily a philosophical exercise about the mystical union between lover and beloved, revolving around the Sufi concept of fana↗︎.

Chess of the Wind is another film that went through a similar story to that of Downpour. Neglected and misunderstood under the Shah (with some suspicion of sabotage at the premiere) and subsequently banned outright by the Islamic regime, it was thought completely lost until the son of the director, Mohammad Reza Aslani, found the negatives in a junk shop in Tehran in 2014, and managed to smuggle them out of Iran. His sister then supervised the restoration, and the film was (re-)released to great acclaim in 2020. No surprise that neither regime was too fond of it. It’s an extremely subversive gothic horror period drama. with a very strong role for the female characters, but no spoilers beyond that. This one I’m going to praise with much more high-brow European comparisons than I accorded to Downpour. While watching, I was immediately pushed into thinking of period drama films from exactly that period by Herzog↗︎, Fassbinder↗︎ or Bergman↗︎. That should make you want to see it.

46 films in this section.

A short break here. The first World Cup, in 1930, lasted two and half weeks and consisted of a grand total of eighteen games. The World Cup of 2026 lasted five and a half weeks, and consisted of 104 games. We can see that the drama was extended after Spain carried away the trophy by the sudden/imminent downfall (fingers crossed) of Gianni “Icarus” Infantino. (*note, two months later…. 🫤I WISHED!!!!🫤) So I’ve been distracted. I did remember, however, in the midst of all that to look at a few Middle Eastern films about football. There’ll be a post coming up about these films, which may or may not get into the weeds of FIFA’s many scandals in as much as they relate to the Middle East (spoiler - I think they might - a little bit), but presumably only some time after I’ve digested everything from the Cup and the aftermath.

Apart from the four films listed here, there are at least two other films that will be mentioned in that post. One of the films that I’ll be talking about is Jafar Panahi’s Offside↗︎, which is a long way from being his best film in my opinion, but is quite apposite after all the noise and the difficulties placed in the path of the Iranian men’s team in this World Cup. On the other side of the fence/wall/iron dome, there’s the excellent Storyville↗︎ documentary Forever Pure - Football and Racism in Jerusalem↗︎, which follows the story of the signing of two Chechen (ergo Muslim) footballers by Beitar Jerusalem, the club with Israel’s most notoriously “ethnonationalist” fanbase. You can swap out the word “ethnonationalist” to something more straightforwardly descriptive, containing fewer syllables, and you probably won’t be too far wrong.

Only 4 films in this section.

Back to Iran after the ⚽intermission⚽. I started so naturally I must finish. A brief parenthetical comment here on the evolution of my film rating system - I have entirely given up at this point on any consistency by now (if I claimed such a thing beforehand, which I can no longer remember). Humanity is broken, and so is my scoring system. The seismic-logarithmic scores are emotional reactions, and when I don’t give a seismic-logarithmic score, I’m not necessary implying that the film isn’t good. For example, I gave a mad score to Amir Naderi’s The Search, which I downloaded from YouTube (I think). It’s not beautiful in any very special way, and the continuity of the film is actually very glitchy, but I was feeling so bloody angry all the way through, thinking about the betrayal, or rather the perversion of the Iranian Revolution that was already in progress while he was making the film, and which forced him to leave soon enough. The next film I saw - Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain is a fantastic, meditative, super-intellectual film which clearly owes a lot to Samuel Beckett↗︎, among others, but most especially (I guess, because I’ve never actually seen it) to Pirandello↗︎’s Six Characters in Search of an Author↗︎. It was probably much more emotional for him than my reaction to The Search, but my reaction to the film was a calm intellectual one, therefore I gave it a relatively calm but still highly appreciative score of only 17 out of 10 🧐. I will not attempt to explain any further. There is absolutely no point.

If I ever do accumulate readers to this blog, and some of them are Iranian, I’m going to make another alienating statement. I didn’t especially like Hamoun (#268 on the list). This is akin to the ambivalence that I expressed towards Downpour (#216 on the list). Just as Downpour was for me easily the least impressive or interesting of Bahram Bayzai’s films, while fully acknowledging the cult following and sentimental attachment of Iranians to Hamoun, I have to say that it’s easily the least impressive or interesting of Dariush Mehrjui’s films that I’ve seen. It’s really nothing at all up against The Cow↗︎, or Leila↗︎. The constant jarring synth music and costumes from the dream sequences are very very much of their time. It’s not an especially flattering comparison that I was reminded at the beginning of Doctor Who↗︎ from the late 80s, the point where the famous series declined so much in quality and originality that the BBC decided to can it for a decade. Never mind. I do of course recognise Hamoun as a document of importance, and my opinion about it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

40 films in this section.

At the end of this Marathon (appropriate historical reference, innit 🤓), only a couple of comments. There are far too many films here to comment upon individually, and they will presumably become the collective inspiration for at least half a dozen posts over the next year or two. The funny comment is that the last two films on the list - The Warden and The Night - stand outside all the films that I’ve been through. They were both films that I found after I’d decided on my forwards/backwards watching pattern - hence two more or less contemporary films standing together at the end.

But apart from that… The Warden stands out for the simple reason that it’s just realllllllly bad - !و چه بده اصلاً - which is slightly mystifying, given the director’s previous work, and the quality of the actors appearing in it; but at the same time it’s somewhat reassuring to know that Iranian cinema is just as capable of producing high budget turkeys as everyone else’s. It’s also somehow appropriate, perhaps, that following this film I’ll be gritting my teeth through three films from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which I presume will be spectacularly awful. A post about Middle Eastern cinema’s turkeys (it’s nöt a jöke, Recep 🦃) might be fun to write.

The Night is completely different from everything else. It’s a horror movie, made in Hollywood, but starring one of the biggest stars of contemporary Iranian cinema, Shahab Hosseini. There’s some English dialogue in it, but it’s mostly in Farsi. I have of course included quite a few Iranian films made by directors who are in exile from Iran, but all of them - I think - were made in Europe, within what we might snootily call the art-house cinema framework. The Night is something quite different - not aiming at those Western film critics at all, as far as I can tell. It’s made entirely, it seems, for the the Iranian diaspora audience, which - if not enormous in population - clearly has enough financial clout to have made the idea of making that film seem worthwhile! Bad timing, though. It came out during Covid, and made hardly anything. I’m not enough of a horror aficianado to say whether or not it’s a good example of the genre. I found it scary, but I’m the kind of person who needs to watch a film like that in daylight, so I think I’m the worst possible judge. What I’m more interested in is whether it has any specifically Iranian motifs, or whether it just stands alone on this list as a fairly standard horror movie.

Next up….. Iraq, in full. This obviously overlaps with Iran, and necessarily implies Kurdistan as a very significant area of that overlap.

In fact… Not that I care much for the word, in the context of the Middle East, but at the time of writing these words - (25/08/26) - it was at this point that I created a ROADMAP - in other words a plan of which route to take on the way back to the omphalos of the journey.

Please do not get the wrong idea about the presence of three Saddam Hussein era propaganda films at the top of this list. I do not come here to praise him, merely to examine those films as weird, macabre historical documents. The first of the three really was as awful as my scoring suggests. Without ever forgetting the evil guy behind the making of them, the other two actually surprised me in the end by being relatively watchable and cinematically not completely awful. After suffering through seven Long Hours of watching those three, and searching out new emoji to describe the experience, I looked at what I hoped would be some much more worthwhile films. And of course they were.

It took me little more, or even less than a week to blitz through these films, in the first week of September 2026. There’s certainly one very common thread in the Kurdish films, namely a very strong foregrounding of women’s rights, facing the terror of ISIS/Da’esh in Reseba, and fighting the internal man-woman dynamics of Kurdish society in several other films - Hiner Saleem’s My Sweet Pepper Land, and Shawkat Amin Korki’s The Exam and Memories on Stone. That goes alongside the very obvious themes of war and refugees which are of course most commonly associated with the Kurds. Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly is top of that list - a truly devastating but also quite beautiful film.

The post-Saddam films from the Arab part of Iraq (I really didn’t find many) are - unsurprisingly, I think - just much more about the trauma of living all those years under that man, and then the ensuing trauma of what came after him. The leading director here is Mohamed Al-Daradji. I’ve only been able to get hold of two of his films so far, but for sure both of those were well worth the effort. It seemed very appropriate, after watching his two films and thinking about what the hell led to the rise of Saddam and everything since, to look at a very interesting documentary, predating the fall of Saddam, called Forget Baghdad, featuring interviews with four Jewish men who - each for his own reason - were forced to leave Iraq in the aftermath of the creation of the State of Israel. All of them were members of the Iraqi Communist Party, and not attached to Zionism, but history forced their hand in any case. I’ll leave further commentary on that for an eventual post about that history, for which I’ll certainly be rewatching that film. If you are reading these words before I write that post, however, I strongly recommend the film, which - at the time of writing at least - is available to watch on YouTube.

16 films in this section.

From Iraq I’m heading north and west through those mountains, üp intö the bit that’s cöntröled by Tüüürkiye, and into Syria. But staying for a little longer in specifically Kurdish cinema.

This list will be pretty much the same length as the previous one, but it may take me a little more time to get through these films, as I’m hitting up against the major issue of resyncing substandard higgledy piggledy subtitles for a couple of the Turkish-language films, using AI. It really should be a relatively trivial job for AI, given the right instructions, but it repeatedly chews up my tokens and spits out rubbish.

It seems appropriate to bridge the two sections by starting with Hüseyin Karabey’s My Marlon and Brando, which follows the journey of a Turkish woman from Istanbul to find her Kurdish lover in Suleimaniyeh, Northern Iraq at the time of the George Bush Iraq invasion. Similarly, A Song for Beko - which in some senses stands as the first moment of Kurdish cinematic independence - bridges the borders between Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and the epic Kobanê takes place essentially on one of those borders.

12 films in this section so far.

Having seen pretty much everything I can currently find from Kurdish cinema on all sides of the borders, I’ll be heading back into Turkey proper, filling in gaps that I left unplugged before jumping into the Iran trip. As above, this will involve quite a lot of maddening time trying to sync hopelessly unsynced subtitles with so far hopelessly underwhelming AI, and I may just have to give up on some films if they’re just too much of a struggle.

From Turkey, to Syria. Just a very short list of films at present. I had assumed that not much of value could possibly come out of Syria during those awful Assad years, but of course I forgot that as awful as that regime was, it wasn’t quite the same kind of brash vulgar personality cult as Saddam’s. In other words, some decent stuff was made, and not all of it was banned. However, the one thing that is true is that it’s hard to find it. I got hold of a couple of movies that were suggested, but still searching for other bits and pieces.

Needless to say - not for any good reason, alas - the Syrian Civil War provided subject matter, so a few films regarding that are to be found here. But mainly - as far as Syria is concerned - I think we’re looking forward rather than back. It is to be assumed that some interesting films will emerge in the next year or two (and possibly already have). Besides the Syrian films, there’s also at least one Lebanese film that I haven’t got around to watching yet, therefore listed here.

Quite a big chunk after that of Western-made (mostly Hollywood, but not exclusively) films which you will see listed in three catalogue sections:

• Orientalist films (obvious cases, such as The Mummy or Raiders of the Lost Ark)
• Worthy Western films (questioning the imperialism and the caricatures, typically post-Iraq invasion)
• Biblical and Zionist Mythology (how the former was used by Hollywood to argue for the latter, but also just how the case was made from modern contexts)

Needless to say, I hope, that all three of those categories can overlap in fuzzy areas, and it should end up providing interesting material for an eventual post. I should add that some of the films may actually not necessarily fit comfortably in any of the three categories, but I’ll see about that when I get there. And of course it should go without saying that I have seen some of these films before, especially a film like The Man Who Would Be King, which I suppose I have seen many many times, and which I still enjoy as an old fashioned rollicking good yarn, despite the inevitable approbation of the Woke Brigade. Anyway, I’ll watch them all again, just in the spirit of the exercise and in light of everything else.

Following all that, an interesting contrast with Hollywood, where I’ll focus very specifically on France and francophone North Africa as an extension of the conflicts of the Middle East. It’s obvious enough why that is, France being home to both the largest Jewish and the largest Arab communities in Europe. If I get a move on, and the search for Turkish film subtitles doesn’t drive me insane, I might make it just in time to have watched them all before the incredibly consequential presidential election fully kicks off in the spring of 2027.

Of course I watched a few Diaspora Jewish films right at the beginning of this journey, but like everything else there were a few left over when I focused in on Iran. I’ll plough through them here. Some of them I have/had actually seen before (obviously I’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof!), but it’s good to watch them again in the context of the project.

A very small mopping up operation here, of the films from various parts of the Arab World that I haven’t seen yet. Only three on the list for now (all shown above), but I suppose other ones might turn up.

And THEN, back to the starting point. I think it’s appropriate that I end the journey in the same way that I started, alternating between Israeli and Palesinian or Egyptian films. For the time being, the remaining numbers balance out perfectly to allow me to alternate very precisely, but of course that may change between the time of writing (25/08/2026) and the time of watching.

The completion of that journey will presumably not be the end of this page as a living document, but whenever I hit that final number, which currently stands at 450 films out of a total number of 455 in the database (the difference between those numbers being the films that I’ve just completely given up on finding for the time being), it will OF COURSE be time for a proper rest.