The President’s Cake is our favourite movie of 2025. Here are 11 other standouts Submitted by Joseph Fahim on Tue, 12/30/2025 - 12:12 Hasan Hadi’s odyssey follows a schoolgirl tasked with baking a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein Lamia encounters a sometimes unsavoury cross-section of Iraqi society during her quest in The President's Cake (Maiden Voyage Pictures) Off This was the year when cinemas around the world explored authoritarianism through the prism of the past. Notable films on the theme included the dive into state surveillance and political corruption under Brazil’s 1970s military dictatorship in The Secret Agent ; bureaucracy and Stalinist totalitarianism in Two Prosecutors ; and most intriguingly, white supremacy and racial injustice in recent US history in One Battle After Another . Middle Eastern cinema echoed this sentiment in many of the year’s most significant works. Yet, for the first time, it found an unexpected kinship with the broader global political landscape. Filmmakers from disparate parts of the world, including Europe and the US, are now beginning to experience what it feels like to navigate growing censorship imposed by tyrannical regimes. The political landscape of 2025 looks bleaker than in the immediate aftermath of 7 October . Right-wing governments have been elected in Latin America (Chile, Bolivia), Asia (Japan), and Europe ( Germany , Austria, Portugal, Czech Republic). Populism continues its steady rise; anti-immigration sentiment is sweeping across the globe; and nationalism is becoming the new normal. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gen Z protests erupted in Asia (Nepal, Philippines, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Maldives), Africa (Madagascar, Morocco , Kenya, Togo), and Latin America (Peru, Mexico), demanding economic justice and an end to government corruption. 'The President’s Cake': Hasan Hadi on Iraq, sanctions and his Cannes-winning debut Read More » Cinema has been caught between these two powerful forces: youthful revolutionary energy and the draining pressures of populist political systems. Middle Eastern films were no exception. The space in which they operate remains constrained; European co-production funds continue to shrink, and regional support is perpetually precarious, contingent on the whims of illiberal local leadership. Within this fractious ecosystem, a number of independent gems still managed to engage with the region’s current realities in surprising and affecting ways, blending different forms and genres into political commentaries sharp enough to reach their intended audiences, yet not so confrontational as to provoke the ever-watchful censors. Middle Eastern cinema remains robust, as is evident in our selection of 12 outstanding titles this year, instead of the usual 10. Yet discussion of these films in western spheres remains, at best, inadequate. Humanistic politics often serve as the primary lens through which Middle Eastern movies are evaluated, while form, aesthetics and representation are largely ignored. The result is a flattened discourse in which movies are judged for their political alignment with the critic rather than for their artistry, cinematic language, or place within broader film history. Middle Eastern cinema deserves deeper and more nuanced critical engagement. The following 12 titles demonstrate the breadth and ambition of a filmmaking culture that continues to defy expectations, despite impoverished conditions that attempt to dictate what our films should be, what they should say, and how we are seen and portrayed. 12) Khartoum Five filmmakers – four Sudanese and one British – set out in 2022 to create an omnibus film capturing the everyday lives of residents of the titular Sudanese capital. The outbreak of war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces soon compelled a change of course. What emerged instead was a docu-fiction of remarkable scope. Khartoum blends recorded footage with animation and re-enactments (Native Voice Films) Khartoum is a multilayered panorama of survival; of enduring, encroaching violence, forging new lives in exile, and coming to terms with both collective and personal trauma. Aesthetically inventive, emotionally precise and mature in its execution, Khartoum is essential viewing to understand Sudan’s current malaise. 11) Promised Sky The third feature by French- Tunisian filmmaker Erige Sehiri is the year’s most subtly confrontational film. It is a tender portrait of the transient lives of three Ivorian women, each from a different generation, as they struggle to carve out a place for themselves in an economically depleted Tunisia. Intentionally light on classical plotting and shot with the director’s signature naturalism, the film adopts the same approach that turned her second feature, Under the Fig Tree , into a festival sensation. Promised Sky was the opening film of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and the winner of Best Film at this year’s Marrakech Film Festival. It stands as a fierce yet understated rebuke of President Kais Saied’s racist, anti-African policies and a quiet celebration of resilient black womanhood. 10) Cinema Kawakeb Jordanian -Dutch filmmaker Mahmoud al-Massad’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2016 dark-comedy hit Blessed Benefits is an affectionate ode to an eponymous Amman movie theatre on the brink of demolition. The cinema’s two elderly employees serve as guides through the crumbling space, a heritage site dating back to 1945. Massad, however, complicates his spare narrative by turning the camera back on himself, foregrounding his role as a stuttering documentarian. Interwoven with archival footage of Israel and Palestine , the theatre emerges as a silent, if passive, witness to the longue duree of Palestinian suffering. Meditative and enigmatic yet never distancing, this elegiac documentary is Massad’s finest work to date. 9) The Things You Kill Having previously set his films in Spain and Iran , Iranian-Canadian director Alireza Khatami travels to Turkey for his strongest solo work to date. The Things You Kill is a domestic thriller centred on an immigrant university professor who returns to his home country after the sudden death of his mother. Suspecting that his estranged, domineering father may have murdered her, the professor devises an elaborate revenge scheme. The drama takes a surreal turn when the actor playing the professor is replaced by another, the two performers intermittently swapping roles across the film. Echoing David Lynch’s Lost Highway , Khatami’s Sundance hit is a fascinating, unsettling study of impotent masculinity, inherited violence, and the slipperiness of identity. 8) A Sad and Beautiful World The third feature by Lebanese director Cyril Aris is the year’s best Middle Eastern romantic drama. Spanning decades, this is a star-crossed love story about a gifted chef and an ambitious business developer determined to leave an irreparable mess. The idealism and intoxication of their early relationship is quickly overtaken by the reality of a country allergic to normality. Hasan Akil and Mounia Akl star as two lovers in a Lebanon riven with instability (Abbout Productions) The civil war, a failed revolution, economic collapse and the Beirut port explosion all intrude, as friends drift away and relationships fray under the weight of history. And yet, you never stop rooting for the pair, played by Hasan Akil and the magnificent Mounia Akl – director of Costa Brava , Lebanon – who double as mirrors for our own thwarted romances. 7) Divine Comedy Jafar Panahi’s reductive, overly simplistic Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident has overshadowed nearly all Iranian films released this year. Yet it is this cynical, razor sharp, uproariously comic feature by acclaimed writer-director Ali Asgari ( Terrestrial Verses ) that stands out as the year’s most accomplished Iranian film. Divine Comedy centres on a filmmaker's clash with state censors (Seven Springs Pictures) Co-written by The Things You Kill director Khatami, the film chronicles the trials and tribulations of a down-on-his-luck filmmaker who embarks on a journey to secure censorship approval for his loose reimagining of Dante’s titular epic poem. Populated with deliciously outlandish characters and featuring some of the drollest dialogue in recent Iranian cinema, Asgari’s satire skewers not only state censorship but a film industry complicit in its own constraints. 6) Hijra The second feature from Shahad Ameen cements her reputation as one of Saudi Arabia ’s most distinctive talents. Set in 2001, this road movie follows a 12-year-old girl and her elderly grandmother as they search for the teenage granddaughter and sister who disappeared on their way to Mecca for Hajj. While the pitiless, unyielding patriarchy looms as the story’s most visible antagonist, Ameen’s vision reaches further. Hijra criticises the commodification of religion in Mecca (Biet Ameen Production) Hijra fearlessly explores the tangled complexities of class, race and the commercialisation of Mecca with a rare clarity and sophistication. Immensely affecting and brilliantly daring, it marks a bold new leap for Saudi Arabia's independent cinema. 5) Hysteria German-Turkish director Mehmet Akif Buyukatalay injects much-needed dynamism and freshness into the insular, esoteric world of German cinema with this zippy and highly entertaining whodunit thriller. After a Quran is burned on the set of a movie directed by a German filmmaker of Turkish descent, the film stock inexplicably disappears, prompting a suspected intern to solve the mystery and clear her name. A nail-biting potboiler with nods to Hitchcock and Michael Haneke, Hysteria raises some of the most pertinent questions facing the volatile German cinema: Who benefits from the country’s blinkered diversity politics? Is the immigrant narrative exploited for career advancement? Have second-generation Germans fallen prey to the white gaze and the compulsory pressures of integration? 4) Bouchra The debut feature from filmmaking duo Orian Yani Barki and Meriem Bennani is, visually, the year’s boldest Middle Eastern film. In a coming-out queer drama, Moroccan New Yorker Bennani confronts the mother in Casablanca with whom she had severed ties for nine years. The premise may seem familiar, but what makes Bouchra a singular and utterly bonkers experience is the filmmakers’ audacious choice to tell the story entirely through 3D animation, with all of the characters rendered as animals embodying their existential states. Initially, that conceit may feel disorienting, but once the viewer embraces the directors’ vision, Bouchra sweeps you away. What follows is an immersive torrent of dazzling images, intricate sounds, meta-narratives and raw emotion. One of the wildest and most original films of the year, Bouchra is a new landmark in queer Arab cinema. 3) With Hasan in Gaza This has unquestionably been the year of Palestinian cinema: The Voice of Hind Rajab , Palestine ’36 , All That's Left of You , Once Upon a Time in Gaza , The Encampments , Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk , Gaza: Doctors Under Attack and Louis Theroux: The Settlers , to name a few. Selecting a single title for this list is a thankless task, but for this reviewer the latest conceptual feature by Kamal Aljafari leaves the most indelible impression. Composed entirely of footage from the director’s two-day road trip to Gaza in November 2001, a year after the outbreak of the Second Intifada , Aljafari presents a Gaza rarely seen on screen. An insight into life in Gaza, as filmed in 2001 (Kamal Aljafari Productions) His is a devastated city inhabited by ordinary people who simply want to sit in cafes, eat, and visit the beach. Without a hint of sentimentality, Aljafari – Palestine’s pre-eminent experimental filmmaker – evokes a monumental sense of loss through the smallest gestures, offering a precious portal into a place and people disfigured for life. 2) Roqia Horror remains one of the most underexplored genres in Middle Eastern cinema, particularly in Algeria , where the trauma of the War of Independence and the civil war is often realised through social realism. By contrast, the debut feature by Yanis Koussim is radically different – a bona fide horror film that reworks genre tropes as an open-ended allegory about faith, generational cycles of violence, and the lingering anxiety of the Black Decade . From Roqia to Coyotes: The movies to watch out for this winter Read More » Two plotlines unfold in tandem. In the first, the protege of a Muslim exorcist fears that his master’s loss of powers and memory could unleash long-dormant terrors. Simultaneously, an amnesiac, face-bandaged man returns to his home village in 1993, only to have ominous visitors speaking in an incomprehensible language disrupt his fragile family life. Grounding Koussim’s capricious narratives in a relatable reality intensifies the film’s pervasive dread. Roqia is a rare beast: a gripping, politically charged spine-chiller, propelled by bold, gonzo filmmaking rarely seen in Middle Eastern cinema. 1) The President’s Cake For two decades, Iraqis were compelled to celebrate Saddam Hussein’s birthday with lavish, nationwide ceremonies. Every year, schools were ordered to bake a cake for the dictator, even as UN sanctions plunged the country into abject poverty. In the Marshlands, a nine-year-old girl is tasked with this ritual. With ingredients unavailable in her village, she sets out on a journey to a nearby city – an odyssey that lays bare a nation fractured, decadent and struggling under the weight of its own history. Hadi’s Iraq is mired in distrust, decadence and opportunism (Maiden Voyage Pictures) In his stunning debut feature, Hasan Hadi opens a window onto an Iraq rarely seen on screen: the Mesopotamian Marshes, later drained and destroyed by Hussein as punishment for dissent; a society unmoored from strict categorisation, leaning toward liberal mores; a nation caught between western ambivalence and brutal despotism. Blending magical realism inspired by Iraq’s pre-Islamic epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh , with the unflinching realities of the era, The President's Cake is both a loving tribute to a vanished world and a searing critique of dehumanising western sanctions. It is the year’s most engrossing and poignant Middle Eastern film – a marvel that steadily seizes the heart and mind, culminating in one of the most piercing endings in the region's modern cinema. Hadi is only the third Arab filmmaker to earn Cannes’ Camera d’Or for best first feature , after Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina in 1967 and Houda Benyamina for her 2016 film Divines . With this miraculous debut, he has crafted an Arab classic in the making. Film Discover Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0