The Doha Film Festival jury for 2026 will be chaired by Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase, with a five-member panel set to choose winners from 15 films representing the Arab world, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
Announced on 26 October, the jury brings together filmmakers, an actor and a producer. French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa, Tunisian producer Dora Bouchoucha, Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari, and Italian documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi will serve alongside Kawase. The festival says the panel will decide the competition’s winning films.
Five perspectives, one competition
The mix matters because the judges approach cinema from different parts of its working life. Bessa’s experience is rooted in performance; Bouchoucha has worked in production; Aljafari and Rosi bring filmmaking practices that cross documentary and art, while Kawase is the jury chair. The range does not guarantee a particular result, but it gives the competition a panel able to weigh acting, form, production choices and the ideas a film leaves with its audience.
The 15-film selection itself is international by design. Doha Film Institute says the titles represent voices from five broad regions rather than a single national or commercial centre. That framework gives the jury a substantial job: it must compare films made in different cultural settings without treating one region’s storytelling conventions as the universal measure.
Doha’s November film calendar
The 2026 festival is scheduled for 19 to 27 November. The jury announcement arrives before the event opens, when audiences and industry guests will be able to see the competition titles and follow the debate around them. The festival describes its purpose as supporting original storytelling and bringing filmmakers, viewers and film professionals into the same programme.
For the selected directors, the panel’s decision will be one part of a wider festival conversation: what kinds of stories travel across borders, and what is lost when a film is reduced to a market category. Kawase and her fellow jurors will have to make those judgments from the films themselves. No winner has been announced, and the jury’s choices will not be known until the competition concludes.
Doha Film Festival jury: a broad remit
For viewers, the jury announcement is an early guide to the range of perspectives that will meet in the competition. The 15-title field brings distinct film cultures into one award conversation, while its geographic span resists the idea that international cinema can be represented by a single market. That variety does not predict which films will win. It does mean the jurors will be comparing work made in different cultural and production contexts, not judging a collection built around one national industry.
The five jurors also approach cinema from different professional angles. The Doha Film Festival jury combines those roles rather than privileging a single discipline. An actor may pay close attention to the choices that bring a character to life; a producer understands how a project is assembled; documentary and art practices can challenge conventional storytelling; and a filmmaker’s chair can connect those observations to the larger shape of a work. These are possibilities, not a forecast of the panel’s decision. The festival has not announced a winner, and the QNA announcement does not name the 15 films.
With the festival scheduled for 19–27 November, the jury announcement sets the frame before the screenings begin. Audiences now know who will make the competition decision and the breadth of the selection they will assess. The Doha Film Festival jury will have to weigh each work on its own terms; geography can illuminate context but cannot tell viewers how an individual film performs. The actual verdict must wait until the films have been seen. That interval leaves room for viewers to form their own judgments alongside the panel, rather than treating the jury list as a substitute for the programme itself.
ASTRA Planet will follow the festival programme and its emerging film voices. Browse our Film and Media coverage.
Source: Qatar News Agency, 26 October 2026.
Featured image: Naomi Kawase at the 78th Locarno Film Festival in 2025. Photo by Quejaytee via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0; resized for this page. The photograph is not from the Doha festival.
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