Cairo Int’l Film Festival Announces Winning Films

Saudi filmmaker Ali Saeed’s ‘Anti Cinema’ has earned the Salah Abu Seif Special Jury Award.

The film dives into Saudi Arabia’s decades-long ban on cinemas, a prohibition that shaped an entire generation’s relationship to film. Through archival footage, interviews, and a wry, reflexive narrative style, Anti Cinema unpacks how movies were smuggled, watched in secret and how this relationship created unexpected forms of cinephilia. 

Saeed situates the story within the country’s more recent re-embrace of cinema, offering a layered meditation on collective memory, and the complicated love people develop for an art form they were once denied.

The Jury Prize recognises the documentary’s incisive storytelling, timely cultural documentation and its broader significance at a moment when Saudi Arabia is rapidly expanding its film industry.

‘Souraya Mon Amour’, directed by Nicolas Khoury, has taken home the Best Documentary Award. The jury — Julie Bergeron (France), Bassam Mortada (Egypt), and Alaa Salama (Palestine) — selected the Lebanese-Qatari feature for its intimate, poetic excavation of an artist’s inner world.

The documentary offers a tender, time-bending portrait of dancer and artist Souraya Baghdadi, revisiting her life with her late husband, celebrated filmmaker Maroun Baghdadi, three decades after his passing. 

Drawing from Maroun’s 1982 film Little Wars, which captured their first meeting, Khoury weaves together personal archives, interviews, and present-day reflections on grief, embodiment, and the slow, spiritual work of remembering. The result is a film that drifts gracefully between past and present, tracing how love and loss continue to reverberate through a body and a life.

Egyptian filmmaker Yasser Shafie’s Complaint No. 713317 has picked up the Best Script Award in the Horizons of Arab Cinema competition.

The film unfolds inside a tightly wound domestic drama where a seemingly ordinary complaint file cracks open an entire world of buried tensions. Shafie builds his narrative around the bureaucratic machinery that quietly governs everyday life in Egypt, using the eponymous complaint number as both a plot device and a metaphor for how personal grievances often disappear into institutional silence. The film stars Mahmoud Hemeida, Sherine, and Hana Shiha. 

Palestinian-Egyptian documentary ‘One More Show’ (Dayel A’anna A’ard) by directors Mai Saad (Egypt) and Ahmed Aldenf (Palestine) won the Youssef Sherif Rizallah Award (Audience Award). 

The film follows Circus Gaza, a troupe of performers who, displaced from northern to southern Gaza, continue to present shows for children in shelters and streets, transforming their art into a message of resilience and hope amid genocide.