Sara Ishaq’s “The Station” Brings Yemen’s Women-Only Gas Station to Cannes Critics’ Week

Sara Ishaq’s fictional feature The Station opened Critics’ Week at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. An exclusive clip from Paradis City Sales follows Layal, who runs a women-only fuel station in Sana’a, a rare communal refuge amid Yemen’s civil war.

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Ishaq learned of the station in 2015 when relatives queued for fuel. A documentary was impossible due to restrictions on public filming in Yemen’s conservative society. After a year abroad, she chose fiction to merge personal conversations and broader observations into one narrative.

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The film sidesteps geopolitics, foregrounding women gathering behind closed doors. Ishaq calls the station a microcosm where “the colors emerge and the frankincense and the laughter and the singing,” showing how, amid danger, women cling to “the trivial, the fun, the social” to cope.

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The Station is produced by Screen Project (Ta Films) and Georges Films, co-produced with One Two Films, KeplerFilm, Barentsfilm, Setara Films and The Imaginarium Films. Distributors: Film Clinic Indie Distribution (Egypt/UAE), Paradiso (Benelux), Kalamata Film (CIS) and Arizona Distribution (France). Cast: Manal Al-Mulaiki (Layal), Abeer Mohammed (Shams), Rashad Khaled (Laith) and Saleh Al-Marshahi (Ahmad). Cinematography by Amine Berrada; editing by Romain Namura; music by Tessa Rose Jackson and Darius Timmer.

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Ishaq said she avoided centering the film on Yemen’s war history, describing herself as exhausted by analysis. She said she wanted to highlight the aspects of Yemeni society that make her happy and that she loves, presenting the station as a space where women sustain themselves through communal rituals. She argued that portraying suffering as both beautiful and happy challenges dominant media narratives.

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• “My sisters and my cousins are all going there to queue for fuel. So, I felt that was a very unusual thing to happen. And in a place like Yemen, women always drove but having an exclusive women-only fuel station was just like an amazing concept,” — Sara Ishaq, Director

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• “Filming this would have been impossible. Just carrying a camera around in public was just not going to happen. Also, it’s a conservative society. People didn’t really know who I was. So there are all kinds of restrictions and constraints. So, as a documentary filmmaker, this was really frustrating for me.” — Sara Ishaq, Director

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• “There’s so little known about it, but it’s so complicated,” — Sara Ishaq, Director

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After Cannes, The Station will roll out across the territories of its distributors, with theatrical releases slated for the United Arab Emirates, Benelux, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and France in late 2026. Festival screenings are planned in Europe and the Middle East.

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