The 11th edition of the Doha Film Institute’s incubator event gave filmmakers from the region and around the world the opportunity to show their work to the industry and a chance to talk to members of the press about their projects.
There’s always a buzz around the event as it comes only a couple of weeks before Cannes, and the press is trying to guess which films will be included in the festival’s program. The 2025 Qumra selection once again revealed the institute’s commitment to supporting stories that have social significance, stories that are about remembrance and reconciliation.
One of the international projects is Guillermo Garcia Lopez’s feature film "Sleepless City," which tells the story of a 15-year-old Roma boy living on the outskirts of Madrid. As it centers on a community of Roma and illegal immigrants, Lopez says he first had to win the confidence of the people of La Canada Real, one of the largest shanty towns in Europe. Lopez said the process took three years and that after the three years, the community saw the project as their own film and were very helpful. Lopez’s manner of approaching film echoes the lessons of Qumra masterclasses of Walter Salles and Lav Diaz – that documentaries and feature films often work on very similar premises. It is clear that Lopez is a filmmaker with a social mission. He said the making of the film was a political act in itself, emphasizing that Spain could belong to all immigrants, that Europe had colonized Africa long enough, and that giving something back now was the least the continent could do.
This year’s cohort also included some up-and-coming features, such as Erige Sehiri’s new film "Marie & Jolie," about women from the Ivory Coast trying to make a living in Tunis. Sehiri’s 2022 film "Under the Fig Trees," which was again about women trying to make a living in a village, was a favorite with film critics, and she seems to have carried this subject to the city this time. "Marie & Jolie" is set in the city of Tunis, and like "Sleepless City," it is an immigrant story that needs to take the community into its confidence. Sehiri describes her film as fiction with elements of documentary: the story of three Ivorian women from different generations – a pastor, a resourceful businesswoman and a student. They face several difficulties as foreigners and in conversation, Sehiri points out that 80% of African immigrants stay in Africa. These women recuperate a sense of normalcy and community through the evangelical "underground" church they attend, because, although Christianity is a recognized religion in Tunis, the evangelical denomination is not. Rooting her story very much in reality, Sehiri cast some of the roles from the community. This sounds like documentary work. She says the film is "fiction with elements of documentary" and adds, "truth is not enough, we need to give people hope." This was one of the films that were hoping to go to Cannes and sure enough, when the list was announced on April 10, Sehiri’s name was on there.
Qumra also supports series, and in that category, a story of migration by Zoulikha Tahar looked very exciting. The project is called "El’Sardines," about a bio-marine engineer who is about to leave her native Oran to go on a sea voyage to track the movements of sardines. I find this to be an ingenious plot because, as Tahar explains, it maps human migration onto the migration of fish, and this time offers the migration/sea voyage of a woman, where North African sea passage stories are almost always about men. When speaking about what she has found so enriching about the Qumra meetings, she said it was hearing film people speak in Arabic. As a French Algerian, a product of migrations herself, it sounded as if her character in the film had finally tracked where her kind of sardines were, on Doha’s peninsular coast.
It is always interesting to map out the countries that have made it to Qumra, and in 2025, there were a few from Iraq, more than there had been before. One very interesting project was Hasan Hadi’s "The President’s Cake," based on the practice of each Iraqi classroom having to produce a cake on Saddam Hussein’s birthday during his rule. It is micro stories like these that tell us about the bigger picture that Qumra is so good at bringing to the limelight. Hadi explained how there would be a draw for which kid would have to make the cake, and how it was a sentence of doom when a kid was chosen because it was very expensive to get the ingredients for this impossible project during the years of the sanctions.
DFI’s Qatar selection included projects that received sustained help, as they are more closely connected to the institute. One project that stood out was A.J. Al-Thani’s "Sari & Amira," which she described as ‘‘Lawrence of Arabia’ meets ‘The Light House.’’ Adventure stories on horseback are the Arab Bedouin storytelling tradition par excellence, so the film promises to grow organically out of Qatar’s own landscape and literary heritage. This literary heritage is also explored in Nadia Al-Khater’s "Light to Ashes," based on Labid al-Amiri’s "Muallaqat" poem. The Muallaqat are poems that used to be hung in the Kaaba before the coming of Islam, representing the best products of the Bedouin poetry tradition. Taking on this important subject matter, Al-Khater said she took a more visual approach, trying to both find and create the beautiful imagery of the poem. It was her way, she said, of finding out ‘what Arab culture is and isn’t’ at a time when there was so much uninformed talk about the Arabs.
And it is here, as the French-Algerian film-maker Tahar who also referenced poetry has observed, that Qumra does its job, bringing Arabs from all over the region to get together to share their stories, to create their own story of what it means to be Arab, and how this identity, in all its variety, interacts and cooperates with the rest of the world.
