MANFA (منفى), meaning “exile,” brings together Arabic films exploring displacement, belonging, and the feeling of being a stranger in your own home or elsewhere. Join us at Bázis on October 23 and 24 for two days of films and good company, with no registration or fixed entrance fee, just a suggested donation. All movies are shown with English subtitles. The full screening timetable can be seen below. We wrap up just as BIFF (Budapest International Film Festival) begins, so make a plan to check out their programme too and keep the cinema weekend going!
Friday's programme:
18:00
Cairo Station (باب الحديد ) dir. Youssef Chahine | 1958 | 1h 17min | Egypt
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (البحر الأحمر يبكي) dir. Faris Alrjoob | 2023 | 21 min | Jordan
The event opens with Youssef Chahine’s neorealist classic, Cairo Station. Interweaving the lives of a sexually repressed newspaper vendor, an independent yet tragic femme fatale, and an unionizing porter, the film exposes the deep-seated gender and class tensions of 1950s Egyptian society.
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry offers a poetic meditation on trauma, grief, and the search for closure in a fundamentally liminal landscape.
Saturday's programme:
10:00
The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (ساعة التحرير دقت) dir. Heiny Srour | 1974 | 62 min | Lebanon/Oman
Camel (جمل) dir. Ibrahim Shaddad| 1981 | 14 min | Sudan
The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived chronicles the Omani people's struggle against neocolonial rule. Directed by Heiny Srour, the first female Arab filmmaker selected for Cannes, this powerful agitprop documentary champions solidarity, women's liberation, and the urgent need for pan-Arab socialist revolution.
In his short parable, Sudanese director Ibrahim Shaddad tells the story of the Camel. As a foundational source of labor and sustenance in the region, it serves as an apt, witty and backbreaking metaphor for the relentless cycle of exploitation.
12:30
Phantom Beirut (أشباح بيروت) dir. Ghassan Salhab | 1998 | 1h 57min | Lebanon
Steeped in the atmosphere of hauntology, Phantom Beirut unfolds in the late 1980s as the protracted Lebanese Civil War drags toward an uneasy exhaustion. The film follows Khalil, who faked his own death a decade earlier amidst the chaos of battle, erased his identity, and fled. When he suddenly resurfaces in Beirut in his thirties, his return forces former comrades, lovers, and friends to confront unresolved traumas and the crushing weight of history.
15:00
The Beach House (بيت البحر) dir. Roy Dib | 2016 | 1h 15min | Lebanon
Raeda (مبروكة عليكو) dir. Mariam Janini | 2025 |19 min | Jordan
Unfolding over a single night in an experimental beach house that blends modern and Islamic architecture, four friends reunite. Now living as expats, each must grapple with a profound sense of personal and generational alienation from their culture, history, and ideologies.
Raeda is a crushing short documentary chronicling the life of Raeda, a Jordanian woman, wife, and mother. Through intimate family testimonies and visits to poignant locations from her past, the film offers a deeply moving look into Jordan's Christian social fabric in the 1990s.
17:30
In the Last Days of the City (خر أيام المدينة) dir. Tamer El Said | 2016 | 1h 58min | Egypt
Closing the festival, we return to Cairo. Set on the eve of the Egyptian Arab Spring, the film follows Khalid, a struggling filmmaker unable to articulate his complicated feelings toward his home. Through his lens, Cairo emerges as a pulsing metropolis bursting with life yet fundamentally fractured, as the society around it sways on the edge of collapse.
graphics: Yasmeen Alkayyali