TUNIS — Tunisian actress Eya Bellagha won the award for Best First-Time Lead Actress at the Amman International Film Festival, whose seventh edition closed on Monday evening at the Amman Citadel, for her performance in Amel Guellaty's Where the Wind Comes From.

Bellagha plays Alyssa, a nineteen-year-old who sets out across southern Tunisia with her more reserved childhood friend Mehdi after an art competition opens up the possibility of escaping the futures laid out for them. It is her first leading role, in Guellaty's first feature.

The festival, subtitled Awal Film — "first film" — is built entirely around debut works by Arab and international directors. Its organisers said this seventh edition, held under the theme "Beyond the Frame", drew the highest attendance since the festival was founded. Three Tunisian works were in official competition, according to La Presse.

"We want a cinema that dares to make bold choices, one that moves forward, stumbles and tries again," festival director Nada Doumani said at the closing ceremony, as quoted by Mille World.

Elsewhere on the prize list, Lebanese director Cyril Aris's A Sad and Beautiful World took both the Black Iris for best Arab feature and the Audience Award, with Hasan Akil named Best First-Time Lead Actor; Iraqi director Hasan Hadi's The President's Cake took the Jury Award; and Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Rashad won Best First-Time Scriptwriter for The Settlement.

A film that has been winning for a year

The Amman prize is not the first for Where the Wind Comes From. The film won at the Mediterrane Film Festival in 2025 and Guellaty took an El Gouna Star in October of that year. It opened in French cinemas on 15 July 2026.

That trajectory — festival circuit first, foreign theatrical release next — is the standard route for a Tunisian auteur debut, and it is also the source of the sector's recurring complaint. A film financed in part by Tunisian public money can accumulate international recognition for eighteen months before it becomes routinely available to audiences at home, because the domestic exhibition network is small and concentrated in a few cities. The prize travels faster than the film.

What the state says it is doing about it

The Ministry of Cultural Affairs has framed its 2026 budget around exactly this bottleneck. Minister Amina Srarfi has said the ministry's total spending for 2026 comes to 460.969 million dinars, up from 425.490 million in 2025, and set out an objective of integrating the cultural and creative economy into the productive system with a target contribution of 3 percent of GDP. The measure aimed most directly at production is the raising of the guarantee ceiling of the cultural industries guarantee fund from 90,000 to 300,000 dinars, presented as a way to support the creation of some 200 companies in the sector.

Guarantee instruments address financing. They do not by themselves address distribution, which is where a first feature by a Tunisian director tends to stall domestically. The measure worth watching, for anyone tracking whether the ministry's stated 3 percent ambition is real, is not the number of films Tunisia produces or the prizes they collect abroad — that record is already strong — but how quickly a film like Guellaty's reaches a screen in Gafsa or Kasserine after it has reached one in Paris.