My Watched List

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 in any case 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. The ordering 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.

God's Neighbours (9)
Cairo 678 (9)
Red Cow (9)
Sandstorm (10)
Footnote (10)
Omar (10)
To Take a Wife (9)
Wajib (9.5)
Shiv'a (10)
Theeb (9)
Gett – The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (10)
The Syrian Bride (7)
The Women's Balcony (8)
Wadjda (10)
The Cakemaker (10)
Clash (10)
Fill the Void (10)
Barakah Meets Barakah (9)
Image of Victory (10)
Farha (10)
The Gatekeepers (10)
3000 Nights (10)
Kedma (6)
Foxtrot (10)
Lemon Tree (10)
Waltz With Bashir (10)
West Beirut (10)
Lebanon (10)
Habibi (10)
Free Zone (4.5)
Pomegranates and Myrrh (10)
Kadosh (10)
The Crossing (10)
Zero Motivation (9)
The Present (10)
Incitement (10)
Like Twenty Impossibles (10)
Time of Favour (9)
A Drowning Man (10)
Bomboné (10)
Divided We Fall (10)
Felafel (8)
Disobedience (10)
Aya (10)
Ave Maria (10)
The Flower of Aleppo (9)
Maktub (10)
Children of Shatila (10)
Remember Baghdad (9)
Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (10)
Tantura (10)
A Man Returned (10)
Beaufort (10)
3 Logical Exits (10)
Tikkun (10)
Costa Brava, Lebanon (10)
Broken Wings (10)
Tel Aviv on Fire (10)
Bethlehem (10)
The Unknown Saint (10)
The Offering (10)
Giraffada (10)
Norman (10)
Capernaum (10)
Farewell Baghdad (9.5)
Where Do We Go Now? (8)
The Band's Visit (10)
Caramel (9)
Menashe (10)

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.

Ajami (11)
A Borrowed Identity (11)
The Insult (11)
Beirut (8)
Son of Saul (13)
A World Not Ours (11)
The Zone of Interest (12)
Memory Box (23)
God on Trial (11)
The Kite (Le Cerf-volant) (2.5)
Disengagement (4.5)
Salt of this Sea (10)
Plan A (10)
Amira (346795)
Children of Heaven (111111)
Eyes of a Thief (7)
About Elly (10)
Paradise Now (10)
A Time for Drunken Horses (10)
When I Saw You (8)
My Stolen Revolution (9)
Layla M (9)
Born in Syria (8.5)
200 Metres (11)
Xenos (10)
A Separation (10)
Circumstance (10)
Holy Spider (10)
Here Comes the Rain (17)
A Taste of Cherry (10)
Where is the Friend's Home? (123456789)
No-one Knows About Persian Cats (11)
Blackboards (10)
Rock The Casbah (9.5)
Hunting Elephants (6.5)
Live and Become (10)
Golda (6.5)
Walk on Water (10)
Late Marriage (10)
Haifa Street (10)
Big Bad Wolves (9)
A Matter of Size (10)
Jellyfish (10)
Abu Omar (63576321657621)
Five Broken Cameras (10)
Huda's Salon (10)
The Stranger (10)
Ushpizin (9)
Yossi & Jagger (10)
Yossi (10)
The Bubble (12)
The Song of the Siren (5)
Rock the Casbah (8.5)
Operation Grandma (0)
Turn Left at the End of the World (3)
Advocate - A Lawyer without Borders (10)
Til Kingdom Come - Trump, Faith And Money (10)
What It’s Like to Grow Up in an Israeli Settlement (10)
The Settlers - Inside The Jewish settlements (10)
True Stories - The Settlers (478533499)
The Attack (10)
Israel's Hilltop Youth: Thou Shalt Not Kill (10)
Saint Clara (7)
The Infidel (6.5)
The Kindergarten Teacher (10)
Policeman (9)
Junction 48 (10)

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 goes on. I very clearly remember watching the first fifteen or twenty minutes of Junction 48, and then watching no more films from the Middle East for at least half a year. 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.

Junction 48 (10)
Shoshana (9.5)
The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du caftan) (10)
Ahed's Knee (10)
Limbo (10)
Offside (9)
Synonymes (10)
Out in the Dark (9)
Everything Is Illuminated (17)
Monsieur Klein (16)
Amal (468931378)
The Meyerowitz Stories (10)
The Believer (10)
The Pawnbroker (357932)
Incendies (4683217)
Persepolis (10)
Forever Pure - Football and Racism in Jerusalem (10)

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 is approximately the same length as the Iranian one, which seems about right. Similar populations, intertwined histories, and relations with “The West” which are different but equally fascinating.

The big difference is that film buffs have heard all about 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. 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.

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 worked on films together, and then, suddenly in 2006, they weren’t, 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 understand what 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 festival critics who spend all their energy curating 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 - watch his films and 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 watch all of them 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 gets you used to cogntive dissonance, but still it’s hard to reconcile the guy who made Blade Runner with such low grade bollocks.

Do Not Forget Me, Istanbul (9)
Watchtower (3656753224689863)
Egg (7)
Milk (7)
Honey (8)
Alone (321683216857951)
Kingdom of Heaven (-10)
Autumn (12)
Toll Booth (732591)
Sarmaşık (13)
Beyond the Hill (10)
Frenzy (15)
A Tale of Three Sisters (14)
Die Fremde, AKA When We Leave (6256853)
Head-On, AKA Gegen die Wand (98732786543890989056)
The Edge of Heaven, AKA Auf der anderen Seite (10)
Takva - A Man's Fear of God (9872394823)
Block C (10)
The Small Town (8)
Innocence (10)
Clouds of May (8.5)
The Third Page (16)
Fate (19)
The Confession (10)
Uzak (11)
The Waiting Room (9)
The Bandit (9.5)
Somersault in a Coffin (568704)
On Board (8)
Home Coming (9)
My Father and My Son (76492318)
Something Useful (86129894)
The Salesman (987239486)
Modest Reception (65446873216)
Climates (14)
Destiny (13)
Three Monkeys (19)
Envy (8197)
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (15)
Inside (11)
Winter Sleep (2894219)
Nausea (15)
Ember (13)
The Wild Pear Tree (18)
Vavien (3495761)
The Little Apocalypse (98321685)

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 has fallen 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.