Life as a genre-nerd film programmer isn’t always easy, largely due to the number of genre-hating film programmers. One interaction I had, years ago, was a film programmer for a significantly large, and now very significantly larger, festival who said that there hadn’t been an intelligent science fiction fiction film since Blade Runner, and even attempts to bring the idea back, like Gattaca, failed because “science fiction is no longer about ideas other than what effects they can make flash across the screen.”
Needless to say, we haven’t spoken in a while.
Every year, dozens of intelligent short genre films cross my desk programming for Cinequest, and many of them are beautiful without relying on effects to drive the storytelling. Some of them are call-backs to the kind of films that were being made in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Kubrick and Godard. Some years, there is something so fresh that it pushes those comparisons out of in. In 2026, the film that made me feel like intelligent and emotionally complex science fiction is alive and well was Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk.
The story is of a mother and her son. In the future, seemingly the near-ish future, people can chose to live forever, longer than the Earth if they can get off-planet. The mother, played with incredibly pointed emotional resonance by Kerry Bishé, has chosen to become an EverPerson. Her husband, stayed human and paid for that choice with death, leaving behind his wife and a son: Anwar. Anwar is a Muslim, his mother is not a woman of faith. Anwar longs for Heaven and his mother has chosen the certainty of eternal EverPerson life.
The story moves from Anwar at ages 8, 18, and 80. Mother remains the same age, but not the same person. The story deals with the path of choice between technology and faith, at the same time as dealing with the idea of a parent’s obligation and limitations. There are, or course, questions of faith, and not simply religious faith.
How’s that for thinking science fiction?
The film is not only intricate emotionally, but it is so very beautiful in nearly every aspect of production. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, stunningly so. The setting, the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains (where I happen to live) are some of the most beautiful vistas in America, and every shooting choice takes great advantage of it. The music, somewhere in the range of minimalism, is used as a salve for the moments of disharmony, a stab for moments of indecision. Silence, though, plays a significant role as well, and when we are left with the silence of emotional situations at their peak, we are forced to fill the air ourselves with thought. That is, without a doubt, the hardest kind of filmmaking; where you establish enough trust with your audience that you can be certain they’ll do the work. If anything can be said of Anwar, it is that Al-Matrouk has faith in his audience to take the effort determine whether a character’s choice is right or wrong, and what that means. We are given a full story, but we have to work through all that means ourselves.
There is also a significant written science fiction pedigree to the film. Fawaz attended Clarion West, that legendary site for the creation of fine stories since a time called the past. He was mentored by Ted Chiang. You might remember him from such award-winning stories as “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Exhalation.” He also wrote the story “Story of Your Life” which was made into a movie called Arrival. If you’re gonna have a mentor, Ted is the one you wanna get. Fawaz developed the story there, and wrote his own adaptation into the short film. The story will be published in Autumn 2026 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can’t get more deeply tied to the history of science fiction than having a story published in F&SF.
And yet, this is one of the most modern of science fiction tales. The villain, if there is one, well, it could be the very concept of choice. Or maybe time. Or maybe, just maybe, it is technology’s siren call. Or the mind-body problem. That thinking in the silence of the tensest moment I mentioned, that’s where that decision is made in the mind of each and every viewer.
I’ve watched Anwar at least five times, and have had at least five different interpretations. It is not that it’s left open-ended, but there's no coda that tells us how to feel as we watch the credits roll. That alone plays so differently from much of the genre work of the last couple of decades. It is a complete story, but just like the stories of our lives, it is not answering any question. That’s a task left for those of us still here after it’s been told.
You can see Anwar as a part of the Unconventional Families program as a part of Cinequest at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, on March 15th and 17th at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, or as a part of Cinejoy (https://creatics.org/cinejoy) online from the 24th to the 31st.
