Film industry sections have been flowering at almost all the top MENA film festivals in recent years, and that attached to the Amman Int. Film Festival is a quietly surprising success story, though one with a difference.
For one thing, the Amman Film Industry Days (AFID, held July 2-9, 2025) is closely aligned with the festival run by Nada Doumani and where that festival is trending. For Alasad and Doumani, the raison d’etre of a festival is not glamour and entertainment but quality time – an intimate festival. This year’s chosen theme, “A World Unscripted,” seeped into the Industry pitching rooms and panels and even into their outlook on narrative. “This year, under the theme ‘A World Unscripted’,” writes Alasad in his catalog introduction, “we embrace uncertainty not as a flaw in storytelling, but as its very foundation.
“Gone are the days when every story needed a perfect arc, a clear genre and a tidy resolution,” he continues. “At the Industry Days, we take pride in creating a space where this kind of raw, unscripted vision is not only welcomed but also needed.”
It is a perspective made necessary, in part, by the uncertain days the Middle East is living through, with the future a work in progress. Perhaps it is this inability to control and predict the near future that has led Arab cinema, in Alasad’s view, to get “bolder and wilder – no rules can hold back its creativity.”
Strikingly, AFID has doubled in size since its second edition. In addition to the festival’s guests, 400 local and international participants registered for the section this year, traveling at their own expense. And AFID received over 150 film submissions from 16 countries (only 12% of them could make the final selection.)
In the end, 18 films were selected to take part in the pitching platform, showcasing the diversity of voices from 8 countries. Hosted by pitching trainers Stefano Tealdi from Italy, Jordan’s creative producer Zeina Shanaah, and Lebanese director, writer and producer Elias Khlat, the pitching platform continues to be a “central pillar” of the AFID program for emerging filmmakers.
It is flanked by the Amman Projects Market, now in its 4th year, an Actors Roundtable with George Khabbaz, Script Majlis hosted by Alexandra Viets, a roundtable on safety on documentary film sets, EAVE on Demand: AI Tool and a hands-on workshop on Unreal Engine for hybrid storytelling. Then there are new initiatives like Incubator, aimed at helping beginners maximize their networking at festivals.
Also quite noteworthy is the number of films that have now started with AFID and gone on to completion and release. These include many well-known titles like Areeb Zuaiter’s Yella Parkour, Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias, Amjad Al Rasheed’s Inshallah a Boy and Khaled Mansour’s Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo. The first and last are both competing in this year’s festival.
