It’s difficult to quantify just how ingrained Lion of the Desert is into Libyan culture. My family, friends, cousins, cousin’s cousins, cousin’s cousin’s friends have seen it and know it by heart. It is a source of pride, seeing our life, traditions and natural landscapes presented with such care and reverence, and the incomparable revolutionary figure that was Omar al-Mukhtar and his fight against colonialism enshrined on the big screen. A true Hollywood epic, with a near three-hour runtime, Syrian-American filmmaker Moustapha Akkad (in his follow-up to The Message) directed grand, sweeping battle scenes, illustrating the tenacity of Libyan rebels in the face of immense loss and disadvantage. Akkad depicts the Italian occupation’s destruction of crops, the killing of prisoners, and the brutal concentration camps where women and children were imprisoned—then cutting to archival footage of the real camps, forever immortalizing on film the imperial cruelties that have been largely forgotten today. — Eman Ibrahim