Cannes 2026 (Critics’ Week): Nafron (dir. Daood Alabdulaa) | Review
The emotional landscapes of Nafron compose a visual poem of the day after the tragedy, in which Daood Alabdulaa kindles the spark of a possible reconstruction.
In a Damascus still numbed by the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime (December 2024), Nafron carries the hazy feeling of a painful awakening—one whose full consequences have yet to be grasped—steeped in a lingering torpor. A Syrian artist who has been living in Germany since 2014, Daood Alabdulaa crafted a short film which unfolds within a landscape of ruins: vast, motionless, and almost entirely emptied of human presence. Desolation has taken over everything, all the way to the horizon. The vanishing lines, nearly always parallel to the lens, shape a world with no escape, no direction, no way out—until a meeting occurs between two women, and a car finally cuts across the frame perpendicularly, opening up the possibility of projection, of bridging past and future.
Nafron is a film of the aftermath—when the bombs no longer fall, yet trauma has settled in. The two characters drift like ghosts, disoriented, suspended in what feels like a parallel reality. The 4:3 frame further tightens this sense of confinement, like a portrait frozen in time.
Conceived as a visual poem, the film’s mise-en-scène is strikingly precise. Every composition is carefully crafted, and the sound design extends the experience on a sensory level. Nafron is a film of ruins, but not a film of urgency—it is a film of contemplation. The ruined landscape becomes a series of emotional terrains, mirroring the fractured and unsettled inner worlds of the two women. Through subtle shifts in scale, they sometimes appear to dissolve into the ruins themselves. Even the prospect of reconstruction, glimpsed in the distance in one shot, feels uncertain, almost illusory—slightly blurred by the lens’s aberrations.
And within this landscape, Daood Alabdulaa breathes in a quiet glimmer of hope. For in this torpor, in this emptiness, there is this encounter. Two souls meet, move beyond their solitude, and perhaps begin the path toward inner reconstruction—bringing something living out of the ruins.
A Syrian-German co-production, Nafron stars Salha Nasraoui and Nada Alabdalla, and is presented at the 65th Critics’ Week alongside The Station, Flesh and Fuel, Viva, and more.
Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.
