Why West Asia kept making great films even as wars raged

For decades, filmmakers in the region have been defying repression with stories rich in irony and allegory, writes Amogh Ravindra

There is a lazy assumption that war destroys culture. That when the bombs fall, the cameras stop and nothing remains until the rubble is cleared. West Asian cinema has spent 50 years quietly proving that wrong, largely without audience attention, because Iranian cinema took up all the oxygen in the room.

Everyone knows Iranian cinema. Farhadi at Cannes, Panahi under arrest, a government that keeps accidentally making its filmmakers more interesting by trying to silence them. Iranian cinema has a story the West knows how to tell. What the West has largely missed is everything happening around Iran, across a region making extraordinary films under extraordinary conditions, in some cases for longer and in more interesting circumstances.

Before the wars, there was a real industry there. Beirut in the 1960s was the Hollywood of the Arab world, with the best infrastructure in the region and Egyptian stars flying in to shoot. Syria, Iraq and Jordan all had functioning state-sponsored film organisations. After the collapse, they did not have to start from scratch. It was rebuilding, under fire, with less money and more urgency. Lebanon lost it first, and what came back after 1990 was smaller and more honest — Ziad Doueiri’s ‘West Beirut’ (1998), Nadine Labaki’s ‘Capernaum’ (2018). One producer described receiving scripts that circled the same four subjects almost without exception: the civil war, sectarian tension, exile, refugees. The question Lebanese cinema keeps avoiding is whether memory is a subject or a trap.

Syria’s story is stranger. The National Film Organisation, a Ba’athist state body, accidentally produced some of the most subversive Arab cinema of the 20th century. Censorship forced filmmakers into allegory, and allegory, handled well, is harder to ban than a direct statement. Ossama Mohammed’s ‘Stars in Broad Daylight’ (1988) features a tyrannical patriarch who bears an unmistakable physical resemblance to the then-dictator Hafez al-Assad. According to a 2025 New York Times article about film restoration, Assad watched a private screening, did not laugh once, and banned it. It went to Cannes. Almost nobody in the West knows Syria was considered a world pioneer of cinematic modernity in the ‘70s and ’80s, because that story does not fit the one the West already has about Syria.

While filming ‘Wadjda’ (2012), Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female filmmaker, often had to direct scenes from inside a van, using a walkie-talkie. It was not legal for women to publicly direct male actors. The rules are more relaxed now.

A Golden Globes feature about the history of Iraqi cinema says the country had 300 cinemas before 1991. Sanctions banned filmmaking equipment. The 2003 invasion destroyed what remained. What survived is not an industry but a collection of rebellious individuals, often shooting in Jordan because Baghdad was too dangerous to use as itself. Filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji was kidnapped twice while making his debut feature, once by militias and again by the US military, both on the same day. His 2025 film ‘Irkalla’ tells Baghdad’s story through the myth of Gilgamesh. That is not a cinema in survival mode. That is a cinema that believes it will outlast the damage.

Stars in broad daylight: Ossama Mohammed's ‘Stars in Broad Daylight’ (1988) features a tyrannical patriarch who bears an unmistakable physical resemblance to the then dictator Hafez al-Assad. Assad watched a private screening, did not laugh once, and banned it.

Palestine has made a similar decision under worse conditions. No state, no stable infrastructure, no uncontested territory, and yet it has produced some of the most internationally decorated cinema of the last 30 years. Elia Suleiman chose absurdism in ‘Divine Intervention’ (2002). Hany Abu-Assad chose paranoid political thrillers, earning two Oscar nominations with ‘Paradise Now’ (2005) and ‘Omar’ (2013). Annemarie Jacir chose quiet domestic realism, where the occupation is felt in logistics rather than soldiers. In 2024, ‘From Ground Zero’, 22 short films shot inside an active bombardment, was still being made while buildings came down around the crew.

Nadine Labaki's 'Capernaum' (2018) is the more popular Lebanese film. It was critically acclaimed and won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Jordan is playing two roles simultaneously. Wadi Rum and Petra have become the default backlot for Western productions that need the ‘Middle East’ to look cinematic but not complicated. Hollywood comes here to borrow the landscape. Jordanian cinema, to its credit, is starting to do something more difficult: claim it. ‘Theeb’, a Bedouin Western set during the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), earned an Oscar nomination in 2015 without a trace of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ romanticism. Saudi Arabia swung from a 35-year ban to the largest cinema market in the West in a decade. As Haifaa Al-Mansour — the country’s first woman filmmaker — herself told NPR in 2013, whenever her crew shot outdoor scenes for ‘Wadjda’ (2012), she sat in a van with a walkie-talkie and a monitor, unable to be seen on the street directing men. That film became Saudi Arabia’s first-ever Oscar submission. Whether state-built cinema can now afford to be an honest mirror remains an open question. Oman, neutral in every geopolitical conversation, has produced almost no films at all. It has one feature film on record, a 2006 Beckett-inspired drama about a fishing community, and a film society running a festival since 2000. That is not an industry. It is the outline of one.

The international festival circuit follows all of this, but not neutrally. The films broke through when the West was already watching their countries burn. That is not discovery. That is just attention arriving late.

What gets lost in that framing is simple. These are not films about conflict. They are films about people who had the misfortune of living inside one, and who kept making art anyway. Not as therapy. Not as protest. But because the impulse to tell a story does not pause for wars, bans or burning archives. Tragedy can silence a person. It has never, in the long run, silenced cinema. Every film across this region asks the same question underneath it all. What does it cost to live inside history you did not choose? Syria answered in allegory. Palestine in absurdism. Lebanon is still circling the question, unable to look away from the wound. The question has been sitting there for decades, patient and unresolved. The cameras have been rolling. People have been trying to tell a story. The world is only now starting to watch.