Saudi Arabia has chosen Anas Ba Tahaf’s A Matter of Life and Death as its entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards. It is one of eight Arab submissions now confirmed after the Academy’s September 30 deadline passed.
The film is set in Jeddah and stars Sarah Taibah, who also wrote the screenplay, as Hayat, a woman convinced she will die on her 30th birthday. She meets Youssef, a heart surgeon with an unusually slow heartbeat, played by Yaqoub Al-Farhan. Mixing romance, dark comedy and fantasy, it uses the relationship between the two to look at mortality and the fear of what comes next.
Lebanon has put forward Rami Kodeih’s Furies, a heist thriller about two sisters who plan to break into a bank to recover savings frozen in the country’s banking crisis, partly to pay for one sister’s surgery. It premiered in the Venezia Spotlight section in Venice and is backed by George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures. Algeria picked Yanis Koussim’s Roqia, a horror film linked to the civil conflict of the 1990s. Iraq chose Halkawt Mustafa’s Kurdish-language No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman, about a sniper searching for her sister after a 2014 ISIS assault; it is a Norway-Iraq-UAE-Sweden co-production.
Morocco selected Laila Marrakchi’s La Mas Dulce, which follows two Moroccan women working as strawberry pickers in Andalusia and premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May. Palestine’s entry is Ahmed Hassouna’s documentary Citizen Osama, filmed in northern Gaza during the war and the territory’s 19th submission in the category since 2003. Egypt chose Abu Bakr Shawky’s The Stories after two rounds of voting on 36 films, and Jordan went with Zain Duraie’s Sink, about a mother facing her teenage son’s mental health crisis.
The Academy will announce a 15-film shortlist on December 15 and the five nominees on January 21. The 99th Academy Awards take place in Los Angeles on March 14, 2027. Last year a record four Arab films reached the shortlist, and Tunisia’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, was the only one of them to make the final five.
