Finjan fil Bustan: Special Halloween Film Screening – Roqia (2025)
Connect over warm drinks, shared stories, and a Halloween screening of Yanis Koussim’s Algerian horror masterpiece.
Event Details
Date: October 30, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM – 5:30 PM | Open Gathering
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM | FILM SCREENING
Location: Al Bustan Art Gallery
This October, Finjan fil Bustan pairs with the spooky season for a special Halloween film gathering!
Finjan fil Bustan is Al-Bustan’s casual community social where neighbors, friends, and film lovers come together over Arabic coffee and tea to converse, relax, and build connections. To mark Halloween, we are pairing our monthly gathering with a screening of Yanis Koussim’s debut feature, Roqia (2025).
Roqia
A film by Yanis Koussim
A mysterious car accident leaves a young father with amnesia as he returns to his home village with a bandaged face at the peak of Algeria’s civil war in 1993. In the present day, an elderly Muslim exorcist is thrust into a losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease as his disciple begins to fear that his demise may unleash long latent terror on their dwelling. Linking this diptych are shadowy visitors wreaking havoc with a gibberish language they whisper to the ears of the uninitiated.
This strikingly unsettling debut feature from Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim is one of the most accomplished Arab horrors ever made: a nightmarish vision of the lingering fears of the Algerian civil war (known as the Black Decade) that is part The Exorcist (1973) and part Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966). Realised with remarkable panache, the thematically rich Roqia is a foreboding treatise on collective trauma, repressed guilt and the lurking violence of the everyday.
Joseph Fahim, Al-Bustan Film Curator
Accessibility: located on the second floor up two flights of stairs.