Sarah Agha and the Arab Film Club: stories that speak to a global audience

In 2020, when the Palestinian-Irish actor and broadcaster Sarah Agha created the Arab Film Club, a platform celebrating Arab cinema, it was a kind of defiance against her industry. She had noticed a dissonance between western representations of Arab identity and narratives by native filmmakers in the region.

London-based Agha struggled to secure roles that weren’t tied to her ethnicity; the characters were either victims or perpetrators of violence. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve auditioned to play a Syrian refugee,” she says over a video call. Though some of her roles have been varied — she has starred in theatre productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe, in television’s Into the Badlands and forthcoming Channel 5 series The Hardacres, plus voice-overs for BBC radio — she says landing non-Arab roles is “a rarity”.

Agha was raised in west London, attending Catholic schools, and completed her degree in Dublin. Her adolescence felt bereft of an Arab community or an understanding of her culture. Cinema had been a source of learning as well as entertainment — a lens into other places, traditions and identities — but she found western films’ portrayals reductive. “It was the usual story about a plane being hijacked by an Arab Muslim. I didn’t want to play those roles. I wanted to know what writers and directors from the Arab world were saying. Surely their stories would be more authentic,” she says.

She discovered a treasure trove of works that not only dismantled western tropes, but displayed a deftness and creativity in their storytelling, characters that were “more nuanced, complex and human”. It inspired her to create a space for people equally keen to learn about their cultures through film.

This month, Agha launched the Arab Film Club’s latest venture: a podcast series, with the first season dedicated to Palestinian cinema. She speaks to five pioneering directors of Palestinian heritage, starting with Jordanian director Darin J Sallam about her award-winning 2021 feature Farha.

Over the past four years, the Arab Film Club has evolved from a small online community discussing films over Zoom to sold-out screenings and panels with industry figures at London’s Southbank Centre, the Prince Charles Cinema and the Glasgow Film Theatre. The podcast series aims to continue the conversations that emerge at events. “People outside London can’t always attend, or some have already seen the film, so the podcast retains that community aspect of uncovering and learning [about the films] together.” A week since its launch, the response has been “really positive”, Agha says, with most listeners from the UK and US.

Episode one delves into Farha, which Sallam wrote and directed. It is based on a true story about a teenage girl whose future is compromised by the events of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”, which refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The film received acclaim, winning an Asia Pacific Screen Award, but it was also met with fierce backlash from Israeli officials who denounced it as “false” and pressured Netflix to remove it. “They said the Nakba never happened and I am a liar,” Sallam tells Agha.

Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias (a 2023 documentary about Soualem’s mother, the Hollywood actress Hiam Abbass) is another that Agha chose for its portrayal of the Nakba. This second episode is released on Nakba Day (May 15), which commemorates the events of 1948. “For Palestinians, the Nakba is ongoing. My father was forced to leave his home and is not allowed to return; people are still being displaced. This is a way to raise awareness.”

She also speaks to Ameen Nayfeh about his West Bank film 200 Meters, Annemarie Jacir on her road movie, 2017’s Wajib, and Bafta-winning Farah Nabulsi about her debut feature, The Teacher.

That four of the five interviewees are women directors was “by chance” but, says Agha, it subverts another stereotype about Arab women as oppressed victims, akin to the characters she is often asked to portray. “[Nabulsi] won a Bafta for a short film about checkpoints [2020’s The Present]. It shows a seismic shift not only in the work Palestinians are able to make but the way the world responds to it. Making these films that are appreciated as art in their own right, I think that’s resistance,” she says. 

Agha co-presented the BBC documentary The Holy Land and Us, in which she visits the Palestinian village from which her father was displaced 76 years ago. “Telling my family’s story on a mainstream platform gave credibility to the Nakba, which many people told me they didn’t know about. It gave people the confidence to talk about Palestine.”

In the films that Agha spotlights, there are universal stories about finding love, familial strains, pursuing dreams. “I wanted to pick films that were uncompromising in their storytelling but at the same time anyone could watch. You don’t have to be Palestinian or Arab to appreciate them because they are accessible. They have all been celebrated for their artistry — and they were all made before October 7,” she says, referring to the Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis.

Agha is pragmatic about the power of cultural works to affect social change (“A film on its own won’t liberate Palestine”), but she recognises their importance in contributing to and mobilising a discourse around freedom that art is often afforded over other disciplines. Art as activism is nothing new, but for Agha it embodies resilience. “The filmmakers [in the series] have found creative ways to reject their conditions and that gives me hope.”

With the ongoing war in Gaza, amplifying these stories is “urgent”, she adds. “I don’t want to detract from what is happening [in Gaza], but let’s also share our creativity, our history. This is my small contribution to say we are here and we will keep speaking.”

The Arab Film Club Podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Podbean; thearabfilmclub.com

​Letter in response to this article:

How Hollywood movies drove Arab boy into exile / From Sadiq Hussain, Bolton, Greater Manchester, UK