Cinema, in its most fundamental essence, is not merely a moving image or a story being told, it is an ongoing attempt to reinvent the world through both memory and imagination. Since the earliest forms of visual storytelling, cinema has been tied to the idea of “once upon a time,” not only as a narrative device, but as a space that allows for the reconstruction of places that may have vanished, no longer exist, or perhaps never existed except in the consciousness of the one telling the story. Cinema does not document reality as much as it reshapes it, reordering the relationship between the humans, place, time, and identity.

In recent years, a number of Arab filmmakers have produced films about their homelands from beyond their geographical borders, films made in exile, or funded and produced within European cinematic systems, yet still anchored to the idea of homeland as a narrative and visual center. Here, a fundamental question emerges: do these films recover the homeland as it was, or do they reinvent it visually according to memory, distance, and the context of global reception?

When a person lives far from their country and navigates a new cultural and geographical space, the gap between the real place and the imagined one widens. They attempt to build a life, an artistic practice, or even a language of their own, yet the image of the homeland remains suspended in memory, sometimes sharp and vivid, sometimes blurred, idealized, or even harsh. Crucially, this image is neither fixed nor unified; it varies from one individual to another depending on personal experience, social class, emotional memory, and political or existential relationship to place.

These complexities deepen when leaving the homeland is not only about traveling or voluntary migration, but a form of exile whether forced or chosen. Voluntary exile, in particular, creates a dual condition: freedom of movement on the one hand, and a persistent sense of disconnection on the other. Here, cinema becomes a tool for negotiating this rupture becoming a means of reconstructing the image of the homeland, questioning it, or even dismantling and rebuilding it through image, sound, and cinematic time.

Within this framework, geography in film transforms into an emotional geography rather than a purely physical one. Streets, homes, cafés, faces, even light itself become extensions of an internal experience lived by the filmmaker, rather than neutral spatial elements. As a result, “homeland” in cinema does not always appear as a clearly defined place on a map, but as a mental image, a feeling, a state of loss, longing, or even conflict.

From this perspective, we can read a number of contemporary Arab cinematic experiences in which filmmakers attempt to recover, reimagine, or interrogate the idea of homeland from beyond its borders: Tarik Saleh (Egypt), Mahdi Fleifel (Palestine), and Soudade Kaadan (Syria). In their films, homeland is not always a direct subject; rather, it emerges through details, through characters, through visual rhythm—or even through the distance itself between the filmmaker and their country.

Tarik Saleh: Homeland as an Image Readable from the Outside

Tarik Saleh’s work can be seen as a complex model of the filmmaker’s relationship to the homeland when it is re-presented from outside its geographical boundaries—especially when this representation is, at least partially, directed toward a European audience eager to hear a “story from within.” Despite limited direct engagement with contemporary Egyptian reality, Saleh is often perceived as a bearer of a voice emerging from the heart of society. This creates a space through which subtle orientalist perceptions can pass—not necessarily through explicit intent, but through the repetition of familiar images of “Third World” countries as they are reduced within the European imagination.

In The Nile Hilton Incident, Saleh chooses a naturally compelling subject: crime, institutional corruption, and a highly sensitive temporal context—the moment preceding the revolution. The film presents an interesting visual structure and an attempt to dissect the security apparatus of that period. However, it intersects with a screenplay that appears fragmented and somewhat superficial in its engagement with the social and psychological layers of its characters.

For Egyptian viewers in particular, this is evident in performances that seem detached from local sensibilities, as well as in the limited use of the city’s external spaces. Cairo becomes more of a visual backdrop than a living entity. The reliance on isolated shots, extended time spent inside cars, and the use of Arabic songs as ready-made cultural markers all appear as attempts to approximate an Egyptian atmosphere, yet they remain more of a formal imitation than a genuine reconstruction of reality or memory.

In Boy from Heaven, which won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, the approach does not differ radically, though the pacing is slower and more controlled. The screenplay here is more coherent in terms of dramatic structure and character progression, yet it remains, in many moments, disconnected from the actual complexity of Egyptian identity.

As in the previous film, there is a recurring use of real footage of Egypt shot from inside a car, combined with a carefully constructed soundscape, in an effort to convince the viewer of the film’s authenticity. The characters operate within a clearly structured dramatic space, but at times they seem to move within an external (conception) of Egypt rather than a fully lived experience.

Extending these same issues, Saleh’s most recent work, Eagles of the Republic, which premiered in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, reveals that these challenges have not diminished, but arguably intensified. The more he attempts to deconstruct the world he presents whether as his personal world or as a cinematic representation of Egypt the more he appears confined within a predefined interpretive framework.

This framework places the film within a category readily accessible to Western reception, but at the same time creates a clear distance from segments of the local audience, who may perceive this portrayal as simplified or reshaped according to an external perspective.

The issue here lies not only in the results, but in the very act of imitation itself. Attempting to reproduce a deeply complex reality through visual tools primarily directed at an external audience can become both an aesthetic and narrative trap. Instead of expanding the filmmaker’s space for experimentation, it may inadvertently push them toward recycling familiar visual and narrative tropes ultimately weakening their ability to construct a more nuanced and specific cinematic world.

Through this lens, Tarik Saleh’s cinema can be read as a form of “visually manufactured homeland” a homeland that can be easily read, understood, and consumed from the outside, but does not necessarily align with the sensory or emotional experience of those who have lived within it. When attempting to recover the homeland from the outside, one may succeed in reconstructing its image but sometimes it becomes the version the world wants to see, rather than the one actually lived.

Mahdi Fleifel: Homeland as an Existential Condition, Not an Image

In complete contrast to Mahdi Saleh’s approach to homeland, as discussed in the first part of this article, Mahdi Fleifel’s experience seems to dismantle the very idea of homeland from its foundations not as a place that can be visually retrieved, but as an ever-evolving emotional state. Fleifel, who was born in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp before emigrating with his family to Europe, He did not experience loss after possession, but rather existence from the outset outside the idea of a stable land. Thus, in his cinema, homeland transforms from geography into a constant feeling of searching for belonging.

This early existential formation makes nostalgia in Fleifel’s work not a longing for a specific place, but a longing for the very possibility of belonging itself. Across his short films and earlier in his feature-length film A World Not Ours Fleifel does not attempt to reconstruct a visual image of homeland, nor does he seek to create a direct cinematic equivalent of Palestine as a place. Instead, he relocates homeland within people themselves.

In Fleifel’s work, homeland resides in faces, in everyday memory, in the fragile human relationships that emerge within the reality of exile. It appears through characters such as Reda and Abu Eyad not as symbolic figures, but as carriers of an entire history of deferred waiting. These are characters who have never experienced their existence in Palestine. Fleifel does not construct an alternative image of Palestine; rather, he deconstructs the very notion that homeland can be an image at all.

His cinema relies on long-term observation and sustained engagement, functioning almost as a living archive of lives suspended between multiple places, without any real possibility of stability. There is no attempt here to beautify the experience or reshape it to suit an external gaze. Instead, we encounter a direct confrontation with the fragility of life within a prolonged condition of exile. In Fleifel’s world, the refugee does not experience displacement as a moment, but as a continuous existential state.

Through these characters, we witness an ongoing waiting for a return to a homeland that no longer exists in its former form, alongside historical promises that remain unfulfilled and hopes gradually crushed under political and social pressures. Even migration, which sometimes appears as the only means of survival, often becomes yet another layer of anxiety and alienation rather than a final escape.

In this world, it becomes clear that the treatment of the Palestinian refugee is not merely legal or bureaucratic, but an all-encompassing experience of existential oppression: social, economic, and psychological constraints that place the individual in a perpetual state of waiting for return, waiting for recognition, waiting for life itself. Ultimately, this waiting does not seem directed toward an imminent event, but toward a slow, deferred ending.

If some cinemas attempt to reconstruct homeland into something visible from the outside, Fleifel’s cinema does the exact opposite. It dissolves homeland into the human experience itself, so that it is no longer a place that can be recovered, but an open wound that cannot be closed, or a collective memory that persists even when the place itself disappears.

Soudade Kaadan: Erasing Geography and Constructing a Symbolic Homeland

Soudade Kaadan’s work offers a third, distinct trajectory in approaching homeland from the outside. Here, homeland is neither restored as a realistic image nor as a direct human memory, but as a symbolic space with blurred features closer to a besieged emotional condition than a defined location. In her films, the world appears limited and enclosed, as though its borders have been redrawn under the pressure of war, and as if the erasure of geography reflects the erasure of Syrian reality itself.

Since her first feature film The Day I Lost My Shadow, which won the award for Best First Feature at the Venice Film Festival, Syria emerges more as a sonic and psychological space than a physical one. We do not see a country as much as we hear endless gunfire and encounter visually closed or labyrinthine spaces vast forests or roads with no exit. Here, space does not function as a backdrop, but as a continuous state of siege reflecting a reality distorted by war.

This perspective recurs throughout her work, where characters move within circular narratives that offer no real resolution, as if the storytelling itself is governed by the idea of inescapability. Her protagonists do not move toward solutions; instead, they revolve within structures that reproduce feelings of helplessness and waiting.

Within this framework, Kaadan adopts a clearly feminist perspective in the context of war: men disappear, die, or psychologically collapse, while women and children are left to bear the consequences of violence, destruction, and the burden of forced continuity in daily life.

In her short film Aziza, symbolism reappears in addressing the lives of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, through an apparently simple treatment that carries deeper implications of displacement, uprooting, and prolonged temporariness. In her latest film Nezouh, Kaadan approaches war from a child’s perspective, presenting Syria once again as ruins remnants of stones, destroyed homes, and empty spaces that reflect the memory of a place more than its actual presence.

However, this heavy reliance on symbolism, while consistent with the themes of war and devastation, creates both aesthetic and narrative challenges within the project as a whole. A realism saturated with symbols, without sufficient parallel dramatic development, sometimes leads to ambiguity and a lack of thematic cohesion. The screenplay often appears weak or condensed in comparison to the weight of the ideas, and the performances do not always succeed in carrying the heavy symbolic layers imposed by the visual structure. As a result, the work can feel like it is trying to say everything at once, yet ends up saying less than its visual premises promise.

This leaves the experience suspended between ambitious symbolism and a narrative execution that does not fully match it raising a new question: is symbolism alone enough to represent a destroyed homeland, or can excessive abstraction strip it of both its human and cinematic presence?

Between Retrieval and Reinvention

Ultimately, these three styles reveal that homeland in contemporary cinema is no longer a fixed concept that can be easily transmitted or restored through images. Instead, it has become a fluid structure shaped by the filmmaker’s position in relation to their place of origin, and by their psychological and historical relationship to it.

Homeland, when seen from within, differs radically from the homeland reconstructed from the outside and even more so when it is lost, destroyed, or deferred in memory.

What becomes clear is that cinema does not so much recover homeland as it reconfigures it. Sometimes it becomes an image, sometimes a memory, and sometimes a psychological or symbolic trace. Yet every attempt at retrieval carries inherent risks: the risk of simplification, reduction, or falling into ready-made representations shaped by external audiences, festival markets, or even personal nostalgia.

Cinema, as a visual medium, tends by nature to create a visible equivalent of the homeland but this equivalent is not always faithful to lived reality. It may be more ordered, more brutal, or more symbolic than reality itself. Here, an ethical and aesthetic question emerges with force: is representing homeland from the outside an act of recovery, or an act of reinvention?

Perhaps the answer suggested by these experiences is that homeland in exile cinema is no longer a place one can reach, but an ongoing negotiation between memory and reality, longing and critique, the desire for belonging and the fear of falsification. A homeland that is imagined as much as it is lost, narrated as much as it fragments.

Between the image the world wants, the memory the filmmaker carries, and the distance between them, films are born that attempt to grasp something elusive: a homeland not seen as it is, but as it is remembered, imagined, or reshaped by cinema itself.

It is precisely within this space between absence and recovery that the true value of these films emerges, not as documents of their homelands, but as ongoing attempts to understand what it means to belong to a place one no longer inhabits.