Ajyal Short Films Programme 1: Belonging

Ajyal Short Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Our short programmes at DFF 2025 champion new and established voices in equal measure. Curated with care, each selection offers bold craft, fresh perspectives and the pleasures of discovery, from Qatar to the wider region and beyond. Short in length, expansive in thought.

Ajyal Short Films Programme 2: Beginnings

Ajyal Short Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Our short programmes at DFF 2025 champion new and established voices in equal measure. Curated with care, each selection offers bold craft, fresh perspectives and the pleasures of discovery, from Qatar to the wider region and beyond. Short in length, expansive in thought.

Bariq Short Films Programme & Cine-Concert: Wonderful Explorations

Out of Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Our short programmes at DFF 2025 champion new and established voices in equal measure. Curated with care, each selection offers bold craft, fresh perspectives and the pleasures of discovery, from Qatar to the wider region and beyond. Short in length, expansive in thought.

Blue Heron

International Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

International Feature Film Competition In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family move to Vancouver Island, hoping for a new start. But as her brother Jeremy’s erratic behaviour grows increasingly dangerous, the family’s fragile sense of peace begins to crumble. Years later, Sasha, now an adult, looks back through memories, home videos, and silence, seeking to make sense of what was lost. ‘Blue Heron’ is a tender, haunting meditation on family, memory, and the quiet distances between love and understanding.

Sophy Romvari / Canada, Hungary / Feature Narrative

ChaO

Ajyal Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Ajyal Feature Film Competition In a near-future where humans and merfolk coexist, a gentle office worker is suddenly proposed to by a mermaid princess and finds his carefully ordered life turned inside out. As they navigate clashing customs and everyday misunderstandings, sincere affection begins to dismantle habit and fear. A playful romance becomes a study in tolerance: love as translation, patience as courage, and a city learning to accommodate difference.

Yasuhiro Aoki / Japan / Feature Narrative

The Christophers

Out of Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Gala Screening Eight unfinished canvases sit in storage, the remnants of a myth and a career that flared during Britain’s 1960s–70s pop-art boom. Desperate for an inheritance, two siblings recruit a gifted restorer, once a forger, to finish the series and return the works to hiding, ready to be “found” when their father dies. To reach them, she insinuates herself into the artist’s house and daily routine, discovering a fortress of clutter, caustic humour and a man armoured by wit, vanity and fear, an icon who has stopped painting yet cannot stop performing.

Steven Soderbergh / United States of America, United Kingdom / Feature Narrative

Cotton Queen

International Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

International Feature Film Competition In a cotton-farming village in Sudan, teenage Nafisa finds herself torn between tradition and change. When a businessman arrives with genetically modified cotton and a marriage proposal, she becomes the centre of a struggle for her village’s future. As her grandmother, Al-Sit, clings to old hierarchies, Nafisa begins to awaken to her own power. 'Cotton Queen' is a tender and politically charged coming-of-age tale about women’s resilience, self-determination, and the fight to shape their destiny.

Suzannah Mirghani / Sudan, Germany, France, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia / Feature Narrative

Divine Comedy

International Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

International Feature Film Competition A 40-year-old filmmaker, long denied the right to screen his work at home, attempts an underground showing with the help of his sharp-witted, Vespa-riding producer. As they navigate permits, offices and unanswered phones, the static grind of bureaucracy reveals its own dark comedy. What begins as a screening becomes a study in perseverance, quiet wit and the stubborn hope that seeing, and being seen, still matter.

Ali Asgari / Iran, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey / Feature Narrative

Fantastique

Ajyal Film Club - Doha Film Festival 2025

Ajyal Film Club A 14-year-old contortionist in Conakry balances training with caring for her ill mother and keeping up at school. As one of the few girls in a boys’ acrobatic troupe, she dreams of joining the next tour, yet the more expectations gather, the more she questions what she truly wants. Blending documentary with hints of the fantastical, the film listens closely to daily life, where folklore brushes reality, and traces a tender, complex path towards self-determination.

Marjolijn Prins / Belgium, France, Netherlands / Feature Documentary

The Fin

Ajyal Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Ajyal Feature Film Competition After war and ecological collapse, a society hunts mutated outcasts known as Omegas for cheap labour. Hiding in a gloomy indoor fishing store that sells nostalgia as entertainment, one Omega keeps her head down until a newly recruited state worker notices small anomalies and starts to look closer. Doubt enters duty; faith in the system falters. Told with textured, rough-hewn imagery and a feel for hesitation and fear, the story asks how collective panic reshapes ordinary lives and who pays the price.

Syeyoung Park / South Korea, Germany, Qatar / Feature Narrative

Hair, Paper, Water…

International Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

International Feature Film Competition In a remote Vietnamese village, an elderly Rục grandmother cares for her grandchildren while sharing fragments of a language at risk of disappearing. Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, she now moves between memory and the present, visited by dreams of her late mother calling her home. Shot on 16mm and made in close collaboration with the Rục community, the film is a lyrical meditation on loss, heritage, and the quiet transmission of memory across generations.

Nicolas Graux, Trương Minh Quý / France, Belgium, Vietnam / Feature Documentary

Home

Out of Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

After an alien race, the Boov, relocate humanity to tidy up Earth, a resourceful teenager, Tip, evades capture and searches for her mother. She reluctantly teams with “Oh”, a well-meaning Boov misfit whose blunder may have alerted their enemies, and the pair road-trip across a transformed planet with Tip’s cat, Pig. Dodging officious leader Captain Smek and the looming Gorg, they learn that home isn’t a place but the people you choose, and that friendship can rewrite even galactic plans.

Tim Johnson / United States of America / Feature Narrative