Part of Sandpit Collective’s Film Programme ‘Other Asias’ in partnership with the University of Sussex.
Layla follows a British-Palestinian drag performer navigating love, intimacy, and belonging across the intersecting spaces of queer nightlife, family expectation, and cultural memory. Grounded in everyday encounters while attentive to performance and self-presentation, the film traces how visibility can offer both recognition and vulnerability, care and constraint.
Through moments of romance, humour, and estrangement, the film examines how identity is negotiated within overlapping social worlds and how bodies read as different encounter subtle but persistent forms of pressure. Rather than locating power in formal political structures, Layla turns to the intimate scales of desire, community, and self-fashioning, asking what it means to remain visible to others without being reduced. In this way, it offers a measured reflection on otherness, connection, and the ongoing work of becoming oneself in public.
Screening as part of Mirrors for Princes, a season inspired by the classical Arabic tradition of ethical writing on governance (مرايا الأمراء), Layla functions as a contemporary cinematic reflection on power as it is lived within relationships, performance, and recognition, where authority is continually negotiated in everyday social space.
The screening will be preceded by a short introduction, followed by an optional collective collage-making session inviting audiences to reflect on the film’s themes through shared creative response.
Layla (2024)
Dir. Amrou Al-Kadhi
UK | 100 min
Languages: English, Arabic (English subtitles)