SAKINAH Film Festival showcases contemporary film and video works by Muslim filmmakers from around the world. Returning the weekend before Ramadan, the 2026 edition invites audiences into a generative space of reflection, renewal, and community.

This project was supported, in part, by a grant from 4Culture.

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: 

A Good Day Will Come (Amir Zargara – Canada/Iran – 25:00 – Narrative)
Arash is a professional wrestler with dreams of representing his country and winning gold medals. The country is in turmoil and its people are suffering. Arash must decide between using his platform to stand up to tyranny, or put his head down and remain silent.

Cartes (Rhym Guissé – United States – 13:08 – Narrative)
During her first week of volunteering, Aliyah finds she is an outlier within the trendy environmental activism world. As all her coworkers use this to satiate their ego-driven activism, Aliyah feels pulled to action for more personal reasons: the Environmental Justice Society (EJS was the organization that helped her family’s village in Mali.

Childhood In Between (Chia-Hsuan Tsai – Taiwan – 29:12 – Documentary)
This film features the unique cross-cultural childhood of a pair of young siblings. Their Indonesian mother, Euis, gave up her dreams at a young age due to financial difficulties and came to Taiwan to work as a migrant worker before eventually marrying and settling down.

Dhaanto (Yasmin Yassin – United States – 18:30 – Documentary)
A story about the hidden culture bearers among us. For nearly a decade, a Minneapolis based dance troupe is a spring of traditional East African knowledge for the diaspora and broader community.

“For Purity and Salvation” (Zakaria Abdullahi – United States – 1:07 – Experimental)
In hopes of returning as we arrived, come the trials of calamity.

It Could Have Been Me (Lina Abdulkarim & Mohammed Almashhrawi – Egypt – 11:52 – Animation)
Yasmeen, a 10-year-old Palestinian-American girl, meets Sumoud, a refugee her age from Gaza, during a visit to the local mosque.

Land of Gaza (Ahmed Abukar – Canada – 8:52 – Documentary)
Land of Gaza is a short documentary told as a visual diary, written and narrated by young Palestinian poet Rami Sheen, offering an intimate first-hand testimony of life under siege.

Phases (Kainat Javed – Canada – 13:39 – Narrative)
Yasmeen, a young woman, who is diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder type I tells her boyfriend, Sammy, about her disorder, upon him not taking it well she falls into a deep depression.

The Garden (Muhammed Zain Khaki – United States – 4:00 – Experimental)
A boy wakes up in a mysterious garden. As he moves through it, he encounters the reflection of his own history, exploring how the memories, emotions, and relationships of our past shape who we become.

The Trees Still in Brooklyn (Amina Cami – United States – 9:30 – Narrative(
An insecure young woman reevaluates her identity as a first-generation American during a telling conversation with friends.

Ya Hanouni (Lyna Tadount & Sofian Chouaib – France – 3:00 – Narrative)
While the Mom and the Dad try to put their baby to sleep, a competition arises between them: who will manage to get the baby to say the first word?