A documentary about the students’ movement in Sudan opened this year’s DFI Ajyal film festival. And the unusual, yet super welcomed refreshing choices didn’t stop there.
Ajyal is the Arabic word for “generations,” and the annual festival held by the Doha Film Institute celebrates young audiences, from the smallest at 8 years old to 25, by bringing together juries made up of their peers, but also films everyone can enjoy. The Institute’s cool and elegant CEO Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, who is also Ajyal’s Festival Director announced, during opening night, that there is a new festival coming, the Doha Film Festival, scheduled to take place sometime in November 2025 which only enlarge and enhance the role of the event, as she assured me for this piece on the announcement on Screen, and add more fun and films to the mix.
This year’s Ajyal opened with the haunting doc Sudan, Remember Us by Hind Meddeb, an ode to the power of the youth’s and women’s movements in the unsettled country of Sudan. When I interviewed Misan Harriman, the wondrous photographer and 2024 Oscar nominee about the event, he admitted that he broke down when Fatma first told him in London she would open the festival with the film. It’s unusual to have cinematic organizations put their proverbial “money where their mouths are,” and the DFI does it time and time again. As a sideline example, I have learned that a fellow journalist from Lebanon has been hosted in the country since the powers that be at the Institute learned she has the big “C”. Just so she can get better treatment. And everyone around her is so kind and helpful, I feel like I’ve landed in an alternate universe, where people have rediscovered their humanity. Doha does that to me, time and time again.
On opening night, audiences were also treated to a poem about Gaza by Her Excellency Lolwah bint Rashid Al Khater, who was recently appointed Qatar’s Minister of Education and Higher Education. She made the focus of her speech Mahmoud Ajour, a child from Gaza to whom she gave an award. Ajour was brought to Doha for medical treatment after losing both hands and the award serves as symbolic recognition of the courage and hope of all children in Gaza who continue to endure the horrors of war while striving for survival and a brighter future.
“Witnessing the catastrophe in Gaza taught us that every moment matters, for it could be the last,” Alremaihi said, continuing, “it also made us see the fundamental truth that we have the ability to channel the power of cinema to do good. We decided to confront the catastrophe and dared to imagine holding Ajyal in Gaza itself. It unfolded in three stages with 90 young jurors in Gaza watching films ‘Made in Qatar’, with their votes to be announced on the closing day. They join over 550 other young Ajyal jurors from around the world to empower youth through cinema.” The festival continues to spread and evolve and now includes traveling popups like the Ajyal Film Club in Tangier this past September in partnership with Tanjaflam, which operates Cinema Alcazar. And the Gaza event is just the icing on the cake, allowing young audiences to dream for a while, as cinema brings them out of the ashes and into its magic for that brief moment in time.
The afterparty on opening night included a stand where traditional Sudanese embroidered caps were available as giveaways for festival guests, while a woman preparing fried sweet Sudanese doughnuts sat nearby, enticing party goers with the scent coming from her table. The evening also included a special performance by Sudanese musician Mustafa the Poet and a few chance meetings like one with Harriman himself, carrying a Leica Q2, and fave Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri.
The Ajyal Film Festival with its theme for this edition “Moments that Matter” continues through November 23rd. For more info, check out their website.
Photo courtesy of the DFI.