Doha Film Institute Unveils 2026 Spring Grants: Mohamed Kordofani, Theo Panagopoulos & Muayad Alayan Among Recipients
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- Doha Film Institute awarded 2026 Spring Grants to 48 projects from 39 countries, spanning development through post-production for MENA and international filmmakers across 15 MENA nations and 11 additional countries including Cuba, Rwanda, and the Philippines.
- Mohamed Kordofani — whose Goodbye Julia became the first Sudanese film to play at Cannes in 2023 — received backing for About Love & September Laws, set in 1983 Sudan as Sharia law takes hold, following a doctor, translator, and African American reporter entangled in love and resistance.
- Muayad Alayan won support for Conversation with the Sea, about a 60-year-old Palestinian man ensnared in Israeli bureaucracy after being ordered to pay his dead son's social security debt.
- Theo Panagopoulos (Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian) received a grant for documentary Before Our Diaspora, built around newly discovered Scottish archival films of 1930s-1940s Palestine, following his Bafta-nominated The Flowers Stand Silently.
- The 2026 cycle includes Cannes 2026 selections, notably Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo's post-genocide Rwanda drama Ben'Imana, which won the Caméra d'Or for best first film across all sections.
- DFI CEO Fatma Hassan Alremaihi framed the grants as an act of cultural preservation, stating cinema "safeguard[s] the histories, perspectives and voices that might otherwise be forgotten."
- Multiple funded documentaries engage active conflict zones directly: Testahbis (Syria's torture legacy), +477 Night (Aisha Adly's personal account of Gaza nighttime displacement), and Searching for Nidal (a Lebanese wedding day shattered when war breaks out).
Why it matters: 48 grants from a single funder represents significant capital flowing into MENA cinema at a moment when most of the 15 represented MENA countries — Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia — are experiencing active conflict or displacement, and the grantee projects engage those crises directly, positioning DFI as a de facto infrastructure funder for Middle Eastern narrative and documentary work that may struggle to find backing from Western financiers.
