Doha Film Festival To Showcase Four Qatari Features In Milestone Moment For Local Industry — SkimNews
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- Doha Film Festival will premiere four Qatari features — Jodari Meno, A Very Ordinary Life, First to Fly, and When the News Breaks You — plus the documentary series Elzam, in Special Screenings at its November 19-27 edition.
- Doha Film Institute CEO Fatma Hassan Alremaihi called the lineup "a watershed moment for Qatar's film and creative industries," framing it as evidence that the country's creative ecosystem has matured since DFI's 2010 launch.
- Media City Qatar backed three of the four films (Jodari Meno, A Very Ordinary Life, and First to Fly), with CEO Hamad Omar AlMannai highlighting the hub's role in "enabling" Qatar's media ecosystem alongside DFI.
- Jodari Meno and When the News Breaks You both received funding through DFI's Grants Programme and participated in Qumra 2025 mentorship, the institute's talent-development platform.
- Jodari Meno follows director Jamal Al Khanji's quest for a world-record dogtooth tuna; First to Fly tracks the first Qatari gymnasts to compete at the Rhythmic Gymnastics World Championships; When the News Breaks You examines the personal toll of Middle East war-zone journalism.
- Katara Studios' eight-part Elzam documents falconers on hunting expeditions, chronicling a tradition Al Romaihi and Ahmed Al Baker cast as "a source of pride in Qatar, the Gulf and the wider Arab world."
- The four films and one series join 15 previously announced features in the festival's International Competition, with the full lineup due in the coming weeks.
Why it matters: Qatar has spent 15 years and multiple state-backed institutions — DFI, Media City Qatar, Katara Studios — trying to build a homegrown film industry from scratch, and the festival's 2025 program is the first time that pipeline has produced four local features in one edition. Three of those films carry Media City Qatar funding, meaning the government's media-hub bet is now generating finished product on international screens rather than remaining an infrastructure project.
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