MENA cinema has a notable presence across the 2026 Venice Film Festival, with nine films appearing across the Competition, Orizzonti, Venice Spotlight, Venice Days and International Critics’ Week. Among the most prominent is Furies, Lebanese director Rami Kodeih’s bank-heist drama, which arrives with George Clooney and Grant Heslov as executive producers. Its story of two sisters attempting to reclaim savings frozen during Lebanon’s economic collapse sits within a wider selection shaped by the region’s political and social realities. Together, the films move from besieged Gaza and postwar Denmark to rural Egypt and a biochipped Tunisia of 2059.
Woman Unknown
Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy enters the Venezia 83 Competition with a drama set in postwar Denmark. As young housemaid Marie prepares to marry her wealthy widower employer, the possible exposure of her wartime affair with a German soldier threatens the life she is building.
A Bit of Light
Iranian director Ali Asgari follows a disillusioned doctor who has been arrested and stripped of his medical practice. Planning to end his life, he spends what he believes will be his final day visiting his siblings and mother, whose compassion gradually draws him back towards reality.
Falling House
In Iranian director Mohsen Gharaei’s Orizzonti tale, a prison guard falsely accused of assisting a jailbreak confines his family at home to prevent his daughter from leaving Iran to model abroad. The resulting family drama has been read by reviewers as a claustrophobic metaphor for the country itself.
Citizen Osama
Ahmed Hassouna directs this Palestinian-French production about a former artistic photographer living in besieged northern Gaza. Now documenting the war, Osama attempts to protect his wife and newborn while recording the devastation around them.
No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman
Kurdish director Halkawt Mustafa centres his film on Vyan, a sniper who shut down emotionally to survive war. After learning that the younger sister she thought dead may still be alive, she returns to Mosul following ISIS’s 2014 assault on a rescue mission that forces her suppressed trauma back to the surface.
Conversation with the Sea
Palestinian director Muayad Alayan follows a 60-year-old man in Jerusalem who is ordered to repay a debt connected to his son Wael, believed to have drowned decades earlier. The court order sends him in search of what actually happened in the Red Sea.
Furies
Probably the most hyped MENA film of the entire festival. Lebanese director Rami Kodeih turns the country’s economic collapse into the premise for an overnight heist. Two sisters plot to reclaim the savings frozen by their bank, with one of them desperate to fund life-saving surgery. Executive produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, the film brings international backing to a story rooted in the consequences of Lebanon’s financial crisis.
Al Baraneya
Dutch-Egyptian director Ashgan El-Hamus makes her feature debut with the story of an 18-year-old pregnant woman in an Egyptian farming village. As falling crop prices lead her family to consider selling their land, a visit from her Cairo-based cousin sharpens her desire for another life in the city.
The H@llow Man
Kamel Laaridhi’s Tunisian feature imagines the country in 2059, when biochips are used to suppress emotion and memory. A man secretly uses banned hypnotherapy and poetry to manufacture feelings for others, until one session exposes a hidden truth about him.
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