Sarah Agha on the Arab Film Club and refugees on screen

One of the most effective artistic mediums for communicating and demonstrating this fact is cinema. And Refugee Week sees us screen three short films that encapsulate just how varied the refugee experience can be.

Their stories stretch from a fisherman from Gaza trapped in his haunting memories, in Waseem Khair’s Gaza Bride 17 to a young woman’s obsession with photographs of cross-dressing Arab women from the 1920s in May Ziadé’s Neo Nahada and Arsalan Motavali’s Cameraman which depicts an Iranian cameraman adrift in late 1990s London. Each of these were curated for the Southbank Centre by Sarah Agha.

A London-based actress, writer and presenter, Agha has performed on stage with the Royal Shakespeare company and The Globe Theatre, and has appeared on screen in Homeland, Into the Badlands, and as a presenter on BBC Two’s The Holy Land And Us: Our Untold Stories. More specifically for us, Agha is also the person behind the Arab Film Club, a community which celebrates and explores cinema from the Arab world.

Back in 2023, ahead of a similar Refugee Week screening event here t the Southbank Centre, we caught up with Sarah Agha to talk about the background of the Arab Film Club, and the process of curating a collection of films on the refugee experience.

How did the Arab Film Club come about? What prompted you to set it up?

The Arab Film Club grew out of an online play reading club I started during the Covid-19 lockdown. In July 2020, six of us came together to read a theatre adaptation of a Palestinian novel called Returning to Haifa. Over the next 12 months, we read 12 different plays from all over the Arab world. It was an empowering platform for us to come together and explore texts from our region, especially whilst theatres across the country were shuttered due to lockdown.

After a few sessions, and the realisation that the Arab world has so much to offer in terms of art and culture, we decided to expand into cinema. Once theatres and venues reopened we wound down the play readings, but the film club lived on. What started out as a small community in lockdown has now grown into a network of over 80 members.

So, how does the Arab Film Club work?

Each month, we pick a different title written and directed by an Arab artist. The sessions are either held online (we watch the chosen film in our own time and then meet on Zoom to share our responses) or held in person at a screening we host ourselves, or by booking tickets to screenings organised by other Arab arts festivals in London. We try to keep the selection diverse in terms of tone, dialect and subject and so far we’ve watched and discussed films from Algeria, Egypt, the occupied Golan Heights, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia.

All sessions are free, informal and inclusive. You don’t need to identify as Arab to join in or be in the film industry. All professions, creeds and ethnicities welcome, you just need to bring an appreciation for Arab cinema and culture.

Has the direction that the Arab Film Club has gone in, or the depth of films you’ve encountered through it, surprised you at all?

Increasingly we’ve been hosting our very own screenings around London, from curating an evening of short films from the Arab world at the Close Up Cinema in Shoreditch to showcasing the Palestinian film ‘Farha’ for 200 people at the Prince Charles Cinema. And recently we’ve been inviting directors to share their experiences making their film at Q&A events we host. Farha’s director Darin J. Sallam flew over to London for the screening and Bassel Ghandour, a Jordanian filmmaker, joined us online after the session on his film The Alleys. It’s especially exciting for the artists and creatives in the group, as they get direct access and first-hand insight from the filmmakers.

We’ve also begun collaborating with other organisations. Last year we joined forces with the Bethlehem Cultural Festival to curate an afternoon of Palestinian short films in Glasgow and we were recently invited to partner with the Garden Cinema for their season ‘Mukhrijat’ celebrating Arab female filmmakers.

We’ve made many discoveries through the Arab Film Club, and whilst there are some recurring themes, often each film will present something new and different and provoke deep conversation. I’m always amazed to see the inventiveness of films which come out of Palestine. Despite a long-standing occupation and increasing restrictions, many Palestinian filmmakers find creative ways to express themselves and raise awareness about their situation and struggle through the humanising medium of film. That to me is inspiring.

‘I’m always amazed to see the inventiveness of films which come out of Palestine. Despite a long-standing occupation, Palestinian filmmakers find creative ways to express themselves and raise awareness about their situation through the medium of film. That to me is inspiring.’

Sarah Agha

How easy is it to get access to the films themselves? Are there some films that you’re keen to see, but can’t get hold of?

Some films are easier to track down than others. A question we often ask during the discussion is ‘who is this film made for?’ Depending on the intended audience – and where the money has come from – some productions have a wider distribution than others. So there have certainly been challenges in the past finding some titles, particularly if the content challenges the status-quo. However, increasingly more Arab films are being added to mainstream sites and platforms and this is heartening because it reveals the growing demand for Arab cinema. A few times near the beginning we had to beg, borrow or steal (ok, not literally) to find certain films but more recently, most of what we watch can be found online or in a cinema at an affordable rate. So things are getting better.

If you could identify one thing you want the audience to take away from these screenings, what would it be?

I believe these films challenge the stereotypical perception of what a refugee is. Too often migrants are presented only as statistics, or figures politicised in the media. So I hope this screening, and the Q&A after it, unlocks for the audience a deeper understanding of what it actually means to be from a refugee background. Despite obstacles and challenges, these filmmakers have found ways to embrace the difficulties, using their experience as fuel for powerful, meaningful, memorable storytelling. I hope this opens hearts and minds to these human narratives and also for the non-initiated sparks a new interest for independent world cinema.