Algeria’s “Roqia” Heads to the Oscars After International Festival Run

Algeria has selected Yanis Koussim’s Roqia as its official submission for the International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, adding another African title to the growing list of films entering the continent’s Oscar race.

The 89-minute film marks Koussim’s feature debut and is a co-production between Algeria, France, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. With dialogue in Algerian Arabic, Roqia moves between two timelines to explore memory, belief and the increasingly blurred boundary between spiritual explanations and psychological uncertainty. The film follows Ahmed, who returns to his village after surviving a car accident that leaves him with amnesia. Unable to recognise his family or fully reconstruct the life he once knew, he becomes increasingly unsettled by a series of unexplained visitors who appear at night. 

That structure gives Roqia a way into questions that sit at the intersection of tradition, faith and the unknown. The film’s two timelines allow Koussim to place different generations and understandings of belief alongside one another. The film, Koussim’s feature debut, first emerged internationally at the 2025 Settimana Internazionale della Critica, the independent Critics’ Week section of the Venice International Film Festival. Roqia also won the Grand Prix for Best Feature Film at the 2025 Algiers International Film Festival (AIFF). Its subsequent festival journey has taken the film to audiences beyond Algeria, earning recognition along the way. At the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece, Koussim received the Award for Best Director, which came with a €5,000 prize. In the United Kingdom, Roqia won the Jury Award for Best Film in the Fanomenon Feature Film Competition at the 2025 Leeds International Film Festival.

That trajectory is significant for a debut filmmaker working with a story so closely connected to a specific cultural and spiritual context.  Roqia is rooted in Algeria, but its international co-production structure and festival circulation places it within a wider ecosystem of African cinema increasingly moving between local stories and global film institutions. The film’s Oscar submission also comes at a moment when several African countries are beginning to announce their entries for the 99th Academy Awards. Algeria joins Morocco, Chad, Cameroon, Egypt and Kenya, whose selections include films representing markedly different languages, genres and filmmaking traditions across the continent.

For Algeria,  Roqia becomes the latest attempt to bring a locally grounded story into one of the world’s most visible international film competitions. Its combination of psychological disorientation, supernatural elements, and questions around spiritual belief gives the film a distinctly Algerian setting while also drawing on themes that can travel beyond its immediate cultural context.

The Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on 14 March 2027, with  Roqia now entering the next stage of the International Feature Film selection process.