SAFAR Film Festival 2025 is coming to Leeds, presenting cinema from across the Arab world.

This year’s festival is bringing newly restored vintage cinema and a Palestinian documentary to Hyde Park Picture House.

A State of Passion (2024)

After 43 horrific days working round the clock under constant bombardment in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, emerged to find himself as a face of Palestinian resistance.

With news footage of him pale and shell-shocked reverberating around the world, he spoke of a catalogue of horrors from lacerated bodies, to amputations without anaesthetics, orphaned children with no surviving family, and the deliberate targeting of medics and hospital facilities.

This was Ghassan’s sixth and most horrific Gaza “war”.  Why does he do it?  Where does he find the strength to face it again and again? How does it impact his family? How do they process the risks he takes? The answer lies simply in their shared passion: Palestine, a passion they articulate through their support of his perilous humanitarian work.

Tickets available Saturday 21 June, 5pm + Q&A

Watch Out for Zouzou (1972)

Celebrate the 10th edition of SAFAR Film Festival with the newly restored Watch Out for Zouzou (1972), by Hassan El-Imam. The presentation of this much loved classic honours SAFAR’s beginnings as a festival dedicated to popular Arab cinema. Back by popular demand and in a revived format, Watch Out for Zouzou was one of the highest-grossing Egyptian films of all time. Starring Suad Husni – known affectionately as the ‘Cinderella of the Screen’ and often compared to Marilyn Monroe – the story examines societal tensions when traditional values and social mores are challenged by modern liberalism in 1970s Egypt. What could be described in modern terms as a ‘musical dramedy’, the story tells of Zouzou, a student who comes from a family of entertainers, but if her peers were to discover that she is a belly dancer by night both her studies and blossoming romance would be at great risk.

Screening Sunday 22 June , 2pm