San Diego Arab Film Festival at Balboa Park

San Diego’s Arab Film Festival is wrapping its 15th edition Sunday at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, closing a two-weekend run of features and shorts from across the Arab world. (sandiegoaff.org) The 2026 festival opened March 27 and scheduled eight screenings across March 27-28 and April 17-19 at the John and Irwin Jacobs Theater inside the museum. Individual screenings cost $15, student tickets are $12, three-ticket packages are $40, and full festival passes are $80. (sandiegoaff.org) Sunday’s final screening time is listed as 3:50 p.m., and the festival says Arabic dinners are offered each evening for $18. Organizers say online ticket sales close the morning of each event, with door sales available until a screening sells out. (kpbs.org, sandiegoaff.org) The lineup is built around feature films paired with shorts, with one program carrying two shorts and one long feature running without a companion short. Festival organizers say the films come from across North Africa and the Middle East, plus some work by diaspora and U.S.-based filmmakers. (sandiegoaff.org, kpbs.org) This year’s program leans heavily into awards-season and political relevance. The festival says it includes all three films from and about Palestine that were shortlisted for the Academy Award for best international feature, and six entries were official submissions by their countries for that Oscar category. (sandiegoaff.org, kpbs.org) KPBS reported that opening-night film “Palestine ’36” sold out a week in advance, and chair Larry Christian said audience response has shown strong demand for films about Palestine alongside stories from the wider Arab world. Board member Jinane Abbadi told KPBS the festival aims to show “diversity” rather than reduce Arab communities to a single narrative. (kpbs.org) The second weekend’s films included “All That’s Left of You,” which KPBS described as following three generations of a Palestinian family, “Sudan, Remember Us,” about artists and protest, “A Sad and Beautiful World” from Lebanon, and Iraq’s “The President’s Cake.” Those titles give the weekend a mix of historical drama, documentary, romance and coming-of-age storytelling. (kpbs.org) The venue matters here too. The Museum of Photographic Arts merged with The San Diego Museum of Art in 2023 and now operates as MOPA@SDMA, a Balboa Park institution that presents photography, film and video programs alongside exhibitions. (balboapark.org) That makes the festival part of a broader Balboa Park arts calendar, but with a narrower focus on Arab cinema that rarely gets wide U.S. theatrical distribution. By Sunday evening, the 2026 edition will have finished the same way it opened: with San Diego audiences watching international films in a museum theater rather than waiting for them to reach multiplexes. (sandiegouniontribune.com, sandiegoaff.org)