Muslim International Film Festival 2025: A Retrospective

For three years the Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF) existed entirely on my computer. I helped with the festival’s film selection miles away in San Francisco, working with a lovely team of Canadians who I only knew through a screen. I never really understood why I spent so much of my time and felt so passionately about an organization that felt so far away. At first, I thought it was because I wanted an excuse to watch more movies, but last week, when I finally made it to Toronto, I was able to put my finger on something else. MIFF is a one of a kind space where Muslims can stop performing their humanity for others and simply live it.

If it wasn’t obvious from the posturing of this site, I love movies because they invites empathy effortlessly. You can sit in a dark room and live through someone else’s eyes without needing to ask for permission. For two to three hours (usually, if you’re lucky sometimes more), understanding defeats language, and supersedes argument. Cinema allows you a window into cultures and across borders without having to go through the exhausting work of translation. But that window becomes foggy, when films are forced to contend with the crushing weight of representation. When Muslim filmmakers are too busy proving Muslims deserve to make films, or when a character’s hijab needs to represent for all Muslim women, the magic of movies gets suffocated by the burden of being singular, of being The Muslim Film™, of having to minimize an entire community of billions into one monolith, and of explaining diversity to audiences who've already decided what they know.

MIFF firmly rejects that contract. Core to its DNA is the understanding that being Muslim is about who you're becoming instead of the boxes that you check. In its truest form Islam cares less about ritual precision than it does about if you are using those rituals to build a world slightly less cruel than the one you inherited. These values don't require perfect Arabic or any specific costume of piety. The best Muslim does not fixate on whether you’re prostrating at the right angle. The best Muslim, as corny as this sounds, only cares about whether you try your hardest to come in with an open heart. MIFF trusts (actually trusts) that if these values resonate with you, then you are a Muslim and your story deserves to exist on your own terms.

When you're not carrying the weight of being the only Muslim film and when dozens of other films are making dozens of other choices, the burden of representation dissolves. Your protagonist's choices become their own. Your characters can reflect your lived experience and you can live art to its fullest truth. Muslim cinema already exists here in all its contradictory particularity. The baseline is assumed, and now we can discuss whether the work is actually good.

Ali (left) with Abdul Muqeet (right), director of film selection for MIFF

This year’s film slate was a delight. I must confess that I had a strong role in selecting the slate but I’m allowed to do a victory lap. Titles included six films ranging from Jafar Panahi’s latest, It Was Just an Accident, fresh from Cannes, to Laila Abbas’ Thank You for Banking with Us, weaponizing heist mechanics against capitalism. Each feature tackled its own highly specific world, unconstrained by the pressure of speaking as a monolith. There was an entry point for everyone. The shorts programs varied from experimental to documentary to narrative, from festival polish to raw phone footage. Muslim cinema contains multitudes because Muslims contain multitudes.

I've spent years existing in a shapeshifting limbo, compartmentalized pieces of myself depending on the room. Conservative Muslim spaces police your observance, measure your practice against someone's narrow ruler, make you feel perpetually inadequate. Non-Muslim spaces (especially the so-called woke ones) treat your existence as anthropology. Even progressive Muslim spaces often just swap conservative surveillance for liberal surveillance, with different rules and the same fundamental distrust.

For four days, I watched people arrive shedding the same armor I wear (a lovely careful calibration of self). The gaze at MIFF is refused. No one is watching you and there is a refusal to organize the entire enterprise around the imagined discomfort of those who might not understand. This refusal begets aesthetic freedom. When you're not translating yourself in real time, when you're not filtering down edges for easy consumption, and you make entirely different work. You can be chaotic and strange and entirely yourself, and you can trust that your audience engages with it like an adult, without looking at you like an alien or a make-a-wish-kid.

MIFF understands that Islam is about your intention and what you believe in your heart. Someone who hasn't prayed in months might still carry Islamic teachings about justice in their bones. Someone who doesn't identify as Muslim at all might share these values and belong here because of it. The boundaries are porous, and in their porousness is the beauty of Islam that I have learned to love.

I flew across the country to see if it was real. If a space could exist where I didn't have to perform acceptable fragments of myself. Where Muslim films could be discussed as films instead of cultural evidence. Where the values I know to be Islam (justice, complexity, care) could matter more than their performance.

In a world where everyone demands that Muslims constantly prove their humanity, MIFF assumes it. And with that assumption, comes a space for us to be perfectly human. In Toronto, I found a space where I could be unapologetically Muslim. The festival will return in November 2026 for a seventh year. I'll be there, and I encourage you to be there as well.