Blackout (Qafla)
Dir. Ahmed Moustafa ElZoghby
Blackout is a film about how jealousy, prejudice and fear spreads faster than truth, and how a single hallway can turn into a charged arena of judgment. On the eve of Eid, in a Cairo apartment building trying to hold onto normalcy, director Ahmed Moustafa ElZoghby reveals what happens when suspicion becomes a communal language and how quickly a woman’s choices can become everyone’s concern but her own.
The film begins quietly: a grandfather collapses, the men rush out to find a doctor, and the building sinks into a waiting stillness. But when a young woman returns home late with a man by her side, the silence fractures. Suddenly, every door becomes an ear, every shadow a warning. The women left behind mothers, sisters, grandmothers begin constructing narratives faster than facts can form. What starts as worry mutates into something sharper: moral scrutiny, whispered verdicts, inherited fear resurfacing under dim light.
ElZoghby doesn’t treat the blackout as a thematic decoration; he uses it as an emotional landscape. In the half-darkness, judgment grows teeth. Faces appear in slivers of light, bodies freeze in doorframes, and the building’s narrow corridors pulse with unspoken accusations. The absence of electricity becomes the perfect metaphor for what’s happening people groping in the dark for answers, and instead finding each other’s worst assumptions.
The ensemble cast creates a symphony of quiet tension. Yara Goubran, Jihan El Shamashergy, Malek Emad, Sedky Sakhr, and Shaimaa Farouk embody the generational anxiety that sits heavy over the building. And the Violence, a different type of violence and it is absorbing more than anyone realizes.
What the film exposes, without ever preaching it, is how easily a community polices a woman how her privacy becomes communal property, how fear disguises itself as concern, how tradition breathes down the hallway like a cold draft. It asks why suspicion feels like safety to so many, and why silence is more readily believed than truth.
By the final moments, Blackout leaves you sitting with the uncomfortable understanding that nothing overtly “bad” needs to happen for genuine harm to unfold. This is a story of ordinary people, ordinary fear, and the extraordinary damage that can bloom in the shadows between them.
Blackout doesn’t end with clarity it ends with the echo of a question we’re left to confront ourselves: What happens to a society when judgment becomes instinct and compassion becomes optional?
Action, Nadia, Cut!
Dir. Salma Elsharnouby
Action, Nadia, Cut! is a film about the quiet weight of dreams how ambition waits in corners, flickers in half-lit rooms, and trembles under the weight of expectation. For Nadia, an aspiring actress, the audition is not a stage of glamor, but a corridor of doubt, where every heartbeat echoes uncertainty.
The film doesn’t present Nadia’s journey as a dramatic uprising. Instead, it watches her in pieces: a sketchbook, a rehearsed monologue, a trembling voice, eyes full of hesitation. Light filters softly through windows, dust motes dancing like distant promises; the editing flows like memory, with dissolves and pauses that taste like longing.
In those small details the gulp before a take, the sketch half-erased, the weight of a family’s unspoken expectations we feel hope and fear tangled together. The world outside whispers: how far will you go? But inside, Nadia carries something fragile and defiant: belief in a voice the world hasn’t heard yet.
Salma Elsharnouby doesn’t give Nadia victory. She gives her uncertainty. She gives her time. The film ends not with applause, but with a quiet breath the kind that lingers when the lights fade, when the camera stops rolling, and everything else falls away.
Action, Nadia, Cut! doesn’t promise success. It offers something rarer: honesty. The kind of honesty that doesn’t demand resolution, but trusts the weight of being seen —even if the world isn’t ready to hear.
The real question the film leaves you with is this: when the spotlight dims, will you still believe in your own voice even if no one else does?
The Last Miracle (Akhir al-Muʿjizah)
Dir. Abdelwahab Shawky
The Last Miracle is a film about what happens when faith and doubt sit across from each other in silence and the air between them trembles. Adapted from a story by Naguib Mahfouz, it follows Yahya, a middle-aged obituary editor, whose life is shaken by a phone call from a man long dead. That single call becomes a ghost note, echoing between skepticism and longing, between mortality and possibility.
Shawky doesn’t dramatize the miracle. He whispers it. In dimly lit rooms, half-lit hallways, the glow beside a ringing phone the ordinary becomes uncanny. Shadows stretch across walls; silence expands to fill the frame with questions. With long takes and slow pacing, the film invites us not to believe in miracles, but to feel them not in grand revelation, but in the trembling of disbelief, in the twitch of a hand, in the blink of uncertain eyes.
Khaled Kamal’s performance anchors the film with quiet gravity. He becomes the hinge between life and death, certainty and yearning. Around him, the supporting cast moves like echoes never loud, always present amplifying the ambiguity that gives the story its pulse. Every detail the muted palette, the sparse soundscape serves one purpose: to keep the boundary between reality and the unknown fragile, porous, aching for meaning.
But beyond its spiritual tension, The Last Miracle carries a quiet defiance. Once banned by censorship before its premiere now restored and debuting at the Cairo International Film Festival it returns as a statement: that inner journeys, spiritual questioning, and the search for transcendence are as urgent as any political narrative.
By the final frame, you’re left not with answers, but with the weight of questions: What does belief cost us? What does doubt give back? When the phone rings in the dark, which voice belongs to life and which to memory?
The Last Miracle doesn’t demand faith. It demands courage the courage to look the unknown in the eye, and to live, waiting.
Window Shot
Dir. Hosein Jalilvand
Window Shot is the kind of film that lands in your chest before it reaches your mind. Built entirely from archival footage of 1950s Kenya, it exposes how colonial powers crafted their own innocence on screen and how cinema helped build a narrative that justified fear, violence, and eventually, erasure.
The film begins with something simple: a window. A settled home. A family framed neatly behind glass. But Jalilvand shows how this “domestic” image was never innocent. Empire hid behind it. The colonizer performed fragility the trembling woman, the startled child, the barking dog, the cat darting across the frame while outside, Kenyans appeared only as shadows, threats, silhouettes stripped of identity. The camera told viewers exactly whom to fear, and whom to feel for.
It’s chilling to watch how effectively the colonial lens worked. The settlers look afraid, constantly on alert, as if danger might erupt from “out there.” The film exposes this as a manufactured narrative one designed to paint anti-colonial resistance as random violence, not a response to oppression. This is where the emotional punch lands: Jalilvand forces us to see how the story was rigged from the start.
The most devastating part is realizing how familiar this tactic is. Frame yourself as the victim, and suddenly every act of resistance becomes a threat. That’s how genocidal logic begins: turn the oppressed into a single image, one that never changes, never grows, never speaks. Keep them in one picture. Make sure audiences never pause to ask who they are, what they feel, or why they rose up in the first place.
Window Shot isn’t content with simply revealing the propaganda. It makes us confront the cost. When media becomes the strongest weapon in an empire’s arsenal, fiction leaks into real policy justifying crackdowns, silencing voices, and shaping historical memory for generations. Jalilvand asks the most urgent question: When does fiction end and life begin? At what point does a staged image become the lens through which entire nations are judged?
By the end, the window no longer looks harmless. It becomes a border a moral divide. Inside: safety, sympathy, humanity. Outside: people stripped of all three. Jalilvand’s achievement is that he shatters the glass and forces us to look again, this time with clarity, with discomfort, and with the understanding that stories can kill just as effectively as weapons.
Window Shot reminds us that history is not just written it’s filmed. And sometimes, the most dangerous thing about a window is what it refuses to show.
Gone People
Dir. Junying Kong
During the Ching Ming remembrance festival, an elderly man (Rocky Huang) navigates the rituals of honoring his ancestors. Between memory and reality, he begins drifting into moments that feel both familiar and otherworldly, searching for identity alongside grief.
Gone People unfolds like a whisper. It moves not through plot but through emotional residue an accumulation of memories, rituals, and half-glimpsed echoes of the past. Time becomes soft around the edges, as though grief itself were bending it.
The film’s opening confuses you, introducing either a delusion or supernatural events. While you wait to confirm or negate one of those expectations, it quietly shifts to the mundane: an old couple preparing for the festival, running errands. Just as you wonder where the story is leading, the film delivers a closure that makes you replay the whole narrative in your head in seconds. The story is told from the other side—they, too, wait for Ching Ming.
Kong’s imagery favors sacred spaces: incense smoke curling slowly, offerings arranged with precision, courtyards washed in muted colors. The camera panning and scene shifts are among the best seen this year, with little inserts that only reveal their meaning at the end. Long takes allow ritual to breathe; close-ups catch tiny shifts in the man’s face—eyes closing not in sorrow, but in recognition. Sound is minimal but evocative: paper offerings rustling, faint chants, footsteps against stone.
Rocky Huang, Weihong Kong, and Pei Liu anchor the film’s emotional core, their performances subtle yet deeply affecting.
The film invites the viewer into ceremonial stillness. Rather than chasing conflict, it opens a space for contemplation. Some may find its abstraction opaque, but its strength lies precisely in this quiet ambiguity. It holds memory gently, without declaring answers, it is a meditative, poetic reverie cinema as ritual, offering a moment of stillness in a world that rarely pauses.
Autokar
Dir. Sylwia Szkiłądź
Agata (voiced by Natalia Wolska), an 8-year-old girl traveling alone from Poland to Belgium in the 1990s, loses her pencil during a long bus trip. The search pulls her into a dreamlike world beneath the seats, where fantastical animal passengers reveal the inner landscape of a child experiencing migration.
Autokar transforms a simple bus ride into a rich emotional journey. Through Agata’s eyes, reality melts into imagination memories bleeding into fantasies, fears dissolving into play. The corridors under the seats feel like portals rather than cramped spaces, as though childhood itself is stretching the world to fit its emotional needs.
The film reframes migration not as trauma but as a deeply personal, imaginative experience. Agata’s world is full of uncertainty but also wonder. She is too small for the big world, and the film’s point of view is always that of a child people become monsters if they act monstrously, but innocence can see through to the good in people. By the end, those she feared turn out to be kind, and she sees people for who they are, not as animals or monsters.
The animation embraces fluidity: colors shifting from soft pastels to warmer tones, creatures emerging gently from the shadows, windows opening into memories rather than landscapes. Sound is understated—the hum of an engine, fabric brushing, distant murmurs mirroring the way a child tunes the world in and out. The voice cast (Henryk Niebudek, Elżbieta Gaertner, Marcin Pempuś, Lidia Sadowa) brings warmth and nuance to the journey.
The abstraction is intentional it makes space for the truths of childhood that can’t be spoken outright. The film explores the dynamic between people with authority and those with less, but ultimately finds hope in the kindness that emerges, it is a lyrical, emotionally rich piece of animation. A journey of imagination, longing, and quiet resilience.
Rabeh Samir Abu El Wafa (Silver Tongue)
Dir. Omar Ali
A smooth-talking television host, Rabeh (Youssef Othman), has built his image on flawless charm until a tiny slip on live TV unmasks his carefully concealed lisp. What follows is a confrontation with vulnerability and the fragile architecture of public personas.
Omar Ali crafts an intresting character portrait using the unforgiving immediacy of live broadcasting. Rabeh’s unraveling is not explosive, but internal. The tension lives in the silences between words, the stiffness of his posture, the pause before he pretends nothing happened. By focusing on the quiet aftermath instead of melodrama, the film reveals how identity itself becomes a performance one that can fracture in a single breath.
From the very first glance at the title, you sense the film’s playful yet meaningful intent. This is a crazy, fun, and meaningful short ride—one that makes you laugh or giggle when it wants, and makes you stop and think when it wants. Omar Ali packs a lot into these nine minutes, and with clever editing, each frame delivers what it promises. The story itself, and how it unfolds, could work as a criticism or a spotlight on negative personal traits, or even the media scene what people do for power, authority, or popularity. Yet, if you look from another angle, it could also be a positive thing: hard work versus obsession.
Minimalism serves the story well. Bare sets, controlled lighting, and small gestures guide the fast paced journey. The film resists the temptation to resolve Rabeh’s crisis neatly; instead, it holds space for the awkwardness, the shame, the self-awareness that comes only when the spotlight turns unforgiving. It’s A precise, elegant character study. A soft-spoken but impactful meditation on ego, exposure, and the fragile nature of self-image fast-paced yet thoughtful.