SAFAR Film Festival 2025 comes to Oxford, presenting cinema from across the Arab world.

Featuring two poignant and incredibly relevant documentaries with coinciding Q&A events coming to audiences at Ultimate Picture Palace.

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 Wednesday 25 June, 6pm + Q&A

Sudan Remember Us (2024)

Following Shajane, Maha, Muzamil, and Khattab: four young Sudanese activists in their twenties, these politically active and artistically creative youth are but a few of a generation fighting for freedom with their words, poems, and chants. Buoyed by courage, sheer will and collective hope, these Sudanese youth risked everything to overthrow the country’s military regime through impassioned revolution.

In a time when Sudan has faced two years of a violent, counter-revolutionary war, famine, and, millions of people forced into exile, along with the indifference of the rest of the world, this film is a portrait of a nation and a people who will continue to persist and insist on a bright and just future.

After the screening there will also be a Q&A with director, Hind Meddeb.

Tickets available Saturday 28 June 4pm