France’s Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, also known as Cinemed, and Beirut-based Arab cinema platform Aflamuna have unveiled the selection for their fifth project incubator event, which will take place within the framework of the festival in October.

The initiative, bannered the Aflamuna x Cinemed Encounters and supporting Arab filmmakers from across the Middle East and Africa, will showcase seven projects.

They include the documentary Disappeared following five Syrian women as they come to terms with the forced disappearance of their sons and husbands under the Bashar Al-Asaad regime, without ever giving up the search for their fate.

The work taps into a raw subject in Syria where at least 177,000 people remain missing having been forcibly disappeared by the regime from 2011 onwards.

It is the latest film from Palestinian, Syria-raised director Anas Zawahri, who made waves this year with My Memory Is Full of Ghosts, revisiting the war-ravaged Syrian city of Homs in 2023, prior to the overthrowing of Al-Assad in December 2024.

Further projects in the selection include Palestinian Wisam Al Jafari’s The Hearse to the Final House of Happiness, about a mental patient who is granted a brief leave from the institution where he is being cared for to attend a family wedding.

It is Al Jafari’s debut feature after award-winning shorts Ambience (2019), By The Sea (2021), Cinema, Mon Amour (2026.)

Hanna Attallah is producing under his Route 243 banner after credits including Thank You for Banking with Us by Laila Abbas, which played multiple festivals including the BFI London Film Festival.

Cinemed and Aflamuna launched their joint project incubator in 2021, with the support of France’s National Cinema Center (CNC), to support filmmakers in 22 Arab territories in the Middle East and Africa,

Under the initiative the participants attend Cinemed’s professional days, running from October 20 to 22 this year, where they French and international professionals and decision-makers for potential partnerships.

“After five years, the Aflamuna x Cinemed Encounters, in the continuity of the Aflamuna connection program, are now a well-established part of the Cinemed Meetings, attracting a vast network of producers, French and European institutions interested in discovering new projects from the Arab world,” said Cinemed director Christophe LeParc.

“We are proud to present the seven projects selected this year, and to help expanding their reach and visibility in European markets.”

Cinemed runs from October 16 to 24.

The 2026 Aflamuna x Cinemed Encounters Selection

A Tale of a Feather and a Fish
(Egypt)
Dir. Ahmed El Hawarey
Prods. Hala Lotfy (Hassala Films), Jeanne Deny (MAD Solutions)
Amidst the shadow of a devastating genetic disease, three broken family members struggle to find salvation; they are guided toward healing by the very loved ones they must care for.

Accept My Plea For Burial
(Somalia/Djibouti)
Dir. Mohammed Sheikh
Prod. Kadir Harbi, producer (Aleel Films)
In a remote Somali pastoral village, two twelve-year-old boys, Waasuge and Warmooge, spend their days herding goats and playing. Their rivalry turns tragic when Warmooge dies after falling into a dry riverbed during a game. With no clear witness and conflicting testimonies, suspicion grows. As grief turns to accusation, Warmooge’s mother refuses burial without justice, and the village fractures under the weight of uncertainty and pressure to resolve the truth.

Disappeared (doc)
France-Syria-Lebanon-Iraq
Dir. Anas Zawahri
Prod. Ahmad Al Haj (Wind Cinéma)
Five Syrian women confront the forced disappearance of their sons and husbands. Through their daily lives and an ongoing search for truth, they resist political erasure, preserve memory, and reclaim meaning within their cities in the Syrian marginalized countryside.

I Have Other Friends (doc)
Egypt
Dir. Yomna Khattab
Prod. Muhammad Taymour (Chaos Films)
Yomna, the director, on the verge of turning forty, takes us on a personal, intimate journey to portray her female best friends. By navigating the difficult postponed conversations with them, Yomna wonders: ‘Who are my friends when I hit forties?’

The Hearse to the Final House of Happiness
Palestine
Dir. Wisam Al Jafari
Prod. Hanna Attallah (Route 243)
When a Palestinian mental patient in his fifties is granted a brief leave to attend a family wedding, the event descends into chaotic absurdity as his political obsession, a restless family, and street protests clash.

The Space I Carry (doc)
Lebanon-France
Dir. Élise Pouchelet,
Codirector and producer. Josef Khallouf (The FilmMonk)
Born in Lebanon in 1975, at the beginning of the Civil War, Elise was abandoned, then adopted, and carried away to France. Fifty years later, she traces the two lineages that run through her, feeling her way through the fragments and silences that have quietly shaped her. It is in the solitude of the mountains, in the company of wild things, that she finally learns to inhabit the space she carries.

Twelve Fig Leaves (doc)
Lebanon
Dir. Joëlle Abou Chabké
Prod. Lara Abou Saïfan (Placeless films)
When filmmaker-turned-farmer Joëlle discovers the Bawāhīr, an ancestral Lebanese method of weather prediction, she embarks on a year-long journey to test its accuracy while building a permaculture project with her husband in his native Bekaa village. As climate uncertainty and political instability mount, their quest becomes a search for resilience, ancestral wisdom, and survival.

Denmark has selected May el-Toukhy’s Golden Lion-winning title Woman Unknown as its entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards.

The post-World War II, Denmark-set psychological drama stars Mathilde Arcel as a young nanny and housemaid, who is about to marry her wealthy older employer, a widower still haunted by the memory of his late wife. Amid the jubilation of the liberation, there is a darker side, as women who fraternized with German soldiers are tracked down and brutally publicly shamed. A painful secret from Marie’s past threatens to catch up with her.

With the Academy’s submission changes, Woman Unknown was already eligible in the international category after it won the Golden Lion in Venice. Mathilde Arcel also went home with the Volpi Cup in Venice for her leading performance.

El-Toukhy directed from a screenplay she co-wrote with Maren Louise Käehne. The picture was produced by Mikael Rieks for Nordisk Film Production A/S in co-production with Nafta Films, Nordisk Film Production Sweden and Film i Väst with support from The Danish Film Institute, Eurimages – Council of Europe, Investment and Development Agency of Latvia, Riga City Council, Nordisk Film & TV Fund, DR, The Swedish Film Institute, SVT, LIAA, Riga Film Fund, TrustNordisk and Zentropa.

Nordisk Film Distribution is distributing in Denmark, while TrustNordisk is handling international sales.

Trust Nordisk announced fresh sales on the title following Venice. The film has sold to Memento for France, as well as Spain (Karma Films), Poland (Best Film), Portugal (Nitrato Filmes), the former Yugoslavia (MCF Megacom Film) and Bulgaria (Beta Film). Previously announced deals include Italy (Lucky Red), Benelux (September Films), Latin America (California Filmes), Greece (Neo Films), and the Baltics (Estin Film).

The film continues its festival run with screenings at the BFI London Film Festival, Riga International Film Festival, and Busan International Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: Have I Got News for You producer Jimmy Mulville is unhappy with the BBC‘s decision to censure the show over a joke involving Victoria Beckham.

In a statement shared with Deadline, Mulville — a producer who rarely pulls his punches — said the nearly year-long investigation into the joke after two viewer complaints was a “total waste of the licence fee” and an example of the “BBC’s paranoia about causing offence.”

In a ruling published on Thursday, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit concluded that host Katherine Ryan‘s gag, in which Beckham was compared to a “c**t,” was editorially unjustified. The unit ordered that the joke be removed from the show. It followed two viewers complaining that it was “gratuitously offensive.”

Mulville, the founder of Hat Trick, said the Executive Complaints Unit missed the meaning of Ryan’s joke. He explained: “Katherine and Victoria exchanged messages on Instagram about the remark, which Katherine put into its intended context.

“In contemporary queer and ballroom culture, the word has been reclaimed. It is used to describe someone who looks extremely confident, impeccably styled, fierce, or authentically and powerfully feminine. Katherine Ryan is a woman who would not disparage another woman in that way.”

Mulville continued: “The fact the two members of a 6 million audience took offence, which then triggered a year-long investigation by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit, whom we’ve never met and sounds like something out of Kafka, is a total waste of the licence fee and is another example of the BBC’s paranoia about causing offence. HIGNFY is set up to be comically and intentionally offensive.”

Mulville joked: “My own definition of a c**t is someone who spends all day looking for problems that don’t exist.”

The BBC has been approached for comment.

In its ruling, the BBC’s complaints unit said: “There was no justification for a comment which presented Victoria Beckham as equivalent to a particularly offensive word.” The ruling added: “The relevant BBC editorial guidelines do not require programmes to avoid giving offence but do require that any offence should be editorially justified.”

The Executive Complaints Unit said its ruling was reported to senior leaders in BBC content. The original Have I Got News for You episode was edited and re-uploaded to iPlayer. The joke no longer appears in the version available on the streaming service.