A Lebanese bank heist towers over this winter's Middle Eastern film offerings

This has been a middling year for Middle Eastern cinema . With Palestine continuing to dominate the region’s cultural discourse and festivals growing increasingly narrow-minded in their selections, critics and audiences alike have found it difficult to get excited about films that offer little surprise and more of the same habitual subjects. There’s a growing disjunction between local audiences for Middle Eastern films and their international counterparts. Middle Eastern viewers crave seeing their lives represented truthfully, insofar as censorship allows. The incessant stream of familiar fest-bait stories about poverty, war, illegal migration, and toxic patriarchy has little of value to them.