For Yassmina Karajah (Instagram), filmmaking is a form of return. The Jordanian-Palestinian filmmaker has spent the past decade building a body of work that bridges continents, cultures, and states of being, searching for emotional truths that lie between memory and movement.
Her first two shorts, Light and Rupture, both premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, with Rupture later selected for MoMA’s New Directors/New Films and added to The Criterion Channel. Her latest film, Ambush (2025), continues that trajectory, premiering once again at TIFF before travelling to the Busan International Film Festival and El Gouna. Shot entirely in Amman, Ambush marks both a creative and personal homecoming for a director who has long navigated the dualities of belonging and distance.
“I was born and raised in Amman, surrounded by art and activism, so storytelling was always around me,” Karajah says. “I studied law first, but film kept pulling me back. It combined everything I loved: writing, painting, music, photography.” After completing a law degree at the University of Bristol, she pursued a BFA in Film Production at the University of British Columbia, followed by time at the Canadian Film Centre’s Directors’ Lab. “When I moved to Canada, I started making short films between Vancouver and Toronto, mostly about the Arab diaspora, trauma, and identity. At some point, I realized I needed to come home, not just physically, but creatively.”
Ambush was conceived out of a single night in downtown Amman. “I was at a pop-up techno event called Ambush, set up in one of the city’s oldest restaurants,” she recalls. “It was this wild mix of artists reclaiming space in a conservative neighbourhood, with music echoing between old buildings. Across the street, five young men were watching us from a rooftop, their building still bearing an old Rolex sign. Once luxury, now low-income housing. That image stayed with me: two worlds facing each other, each curious about the other.” The scene evolved into the film’s conceptual core, a study of class, desire, and the changing face of the city. “At that moment, I wasn’t sure who was ambushing who. Yes, we were being watched, but we were also in their neighbourhood. The film grew from that silent exchange.”
Visually, Ambush departs from the narrative structures of her earlier films, embracing a looser, more impressionistic rhythm. “It became about mood and risk rather than story. I wanted to capture Amman the way it feels on a humid summer night: alive, layered, contradictory. I felt a need to archive my city, to preserve it through the eyes of its youth.” That drive to document, to give shape to memory, runs throughout Karajah’s work, which often examines trauma, displacement, and the politics of desire through an unflinching lens.
Her process is one of collaboration and co-authorship. “When I’m writing for hire, it’s about serving the vision of the project, finding harmony between different voices in the writers’ room, and balancing diplomacy with honesty and openness. In my own films, I take a documentary approach to fiction, building the story through workshops with both professional and first-time actors.” For Ambush, she worked closely with five young men from Amman’s music scene. “The guys who played the rooftop boys, Emad Alkobari, Moath Zagzoog, Mohammad Jayousi, Oday Fraij, and Yazan Eid, are mainly rappers, and their perspectives shaped the script in powerful ways. It wasn’t about me dictating; it was about co-creating.”
That approach extends to her philosophy of direction. “On set, I’ve learned that leadership isn’t necessarily loud. It’s rhythmic. If you’ve done the right preparation and have a deep understanding of your intentions and choices, sometimes the best direction is to say nothing, and trust the flow of the set and your actors,” she says.
Karajah’s identity as both Jordanian and Palestinian, and as a filmmaker who spent years working in Canada, has informed her artistic voice in complex ways. “I’ve lived between the so-called East and West, but I’ve always rejected that binary. The stories I’m drawn to push against those labels and strive to reflect Arab identities that define themselves on their own terms. It’s not an easy unlearning because we’ve all been conditioned to fit those frameworks, but I see a real shift among my peers. Artists are creating from a sense of truth rather than expectation.”
Authenticity, for Karajah, requires presence. “Getting off my phone and away from screens keeps me grounded. I only recently went back to Instagram after a six-year break, just to promote the film. My reference is real life: something I see, hear, or experience. I stay close to the spaces that inspire me, to people and neighbourhoods. That connection to the ground, to lived experience, is my compass.”
When asked about what she refuses to compromise on, she answers without hesitation. “Intent. Alignment is more valuable than opportunity. That’s why we’re creating our own opportunities now. Ones that reflect our political and creative values. Ones that allow us to take up space in all cinematic genres without being defined by a Western gaze. I also won’t compromise on process. People want a specific outcome, but often ignore the process needed to get there. For me, how we make something is just as important as what we make.”
Her filmmaking, even when not explicitly political, carries the weight of representation. “As a Jordanian woman, as a Palestinian woman, my presence in global spaces is inherently political. I take that responsibility seriously.”
At the core of her creative decisions lies intuition. “Intuition is everything. The more experience I gain, the more I trust it. Filmmaking constantly tests your conviction, between feedback, funding pressures, and creative expectations. It’s easy to lose track of your initial spark. That’s why your team matters. The right collaborators will pull you back to that original truth when you drift.”
As she looks toward developing her first feature, set once again in Amman, Karajah remains focused on the long game. “I don’t know about legacy. I have time to learn before I think about that. But I can say this: I’ve often been told to rewrite stories to fit stereotypes, to add the abusive Arab father, the voiceless woman, the narrative of victimhood. I refuse that. Those stories exist and deserve space, but they can’t be the only mirror. I want to make work that shows our Arab tenderness, sensuality, humour, anger, and complexity. Love, resistance, freedom, all of it. We deserve to exist fully on screen, even in contradiction.”
Through Ambush, Karajah has built a cinematic space where Amman becomes both subject and witness, its pulse captured through music, youth, and tension. In her hands, filmmaking becomes a form of reclamation, not of place alone, but of perspective. Each project moves her closer to the truth she is quietly building: that Arab stories, told in their own cadence, can hold the entire spectrum of being.
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