Lebanese heist thriller Furies anchors winter film releases across the Middle East

Lebanese director Rami Kodeih's Furies is the highest-profile arrival in the Middle East's winter film calendar, a debut feature built on a real episode of the country's economic crisis: the 2019 bank robberies in which ordinary customers tried to reclaim frozen savings after institutions restricted withdrawals. The film's central setup involves a hairdresser named Maro, played by Rym Mroue, who is refused access to her money when her sister Dalia, played by Maria Nakouzi, is diagnosed with uterine cancer. A bank manager tells her the institution is not legally obliged to serve clients in such circumstances. Maro then plans a robbery with Sunshine, an elderly former Phalangist fighter, and Hamza, a co-worker of Dalia's who owes money to a local mobster.

Kodeih, who was born in Beirut and is based in Los Angeles, frames Beirut as a city marked by sectarian division alongside communal support, rapid daily movement alongside stalled politics, and hope alongside resignation. He also includes a staged confrontation between Christian and Sunni characters that the source describes as a reminder that sectarian identity still shapes daily interactions 35 years after the civil war ended. The review identifies weaknesses in the relationship between the two sisters and in the staging of the final car chase, while calling the film potentially the best Arab film of 2026.

The winter lineup reflects a split between what regional viewers want and what international festival audiences have been trained to expect, according to the source. It describes a run of stories centered on poverty, war, illegal migration, and patriarchy that local audiences see as repetitive, while viewers outside the region are drawn to those same subjects. The films arriving this season instead work by shifting familiar genres into hybrids, the source states, with the caveat that the results may not always succeed.

Ali Asghari's A Bit of Light is set in Tehran in February 2026, days before American and Israeli strikes, and follows Arash, a physician played by Misagh Zareh, over 24 hours as he considers killing himself after the 2025-26 demonstrations and the state's response to them. The source describes the film as a reworking of Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. A doorman offers to tape his office windows against the coming strikes and tells Arash that