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.

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.

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.

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, 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 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. He hadn’t said much - 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.

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 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.

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, 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 was 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.

Next up will be….. Iraq, which obviously overlaps with Iran, and which necessarily implies Kurdistan as a very significant area of that overlap. From there I suppose I’ll head northwest through those mountains, üp intö the bit that’s cöntröled by Tüüüüüürkiye, and then down into Syria. What’s left after that? I guess I’ll be heading back to the omphalos of the project, and filling in gaps here and there.