White Musk (2026)
Some films find you at exactly the right angle to cut deep, and White Musk, Fatima Wardy's short film, did that to me. I watched it at the BFI London Film Festival, and it is an impactful and genuinely sad piece of work, handled with such honesty that I came away quite moved. Four stars for a small film that carries an enormous amount of feeling.
Loosely based on Wardy's own experiences, it follows Hiba, a nineteen-year-old who becomes the primary carer for her gravely ill mother, Suraya, while her older brother drifts through the household largely untroubled by any of it. What the film captures so well is the terrible double bind of that role, the way Hiba and her mother love each other and wound each other in almost equal measure. Suraya, frustrated and frightened by her own dependence, scolds her daughter constantly, and Hiba keeps showing up anyway, caught in a push and pull that neither of them knows how to break.
I will be honest that this one landed personally. My own father died of bowel cancer, and during his treatment he would not let us talk about it, that same instinct to refuse care even from the people desperate to give it, and so much of the prickliness and silence in White Musk felt painfully familiar to me. The film understands something true and rarely shown, that caring for someone who cannot easily receive care is its own particular kind of heartbreak, and it does not flinch from how unlovely and exhausting it can be.
It is the detail that undoes you. After Suraya dies, during the ritual washing of her body, the family cannot find her White Musk, and she is laid to rest without the perfume she loved. It is such a small thing and such a devastating one, and I found myself certain that Hiba, after all that tension, would carry the guilt of it, a tiny failure standing in for every impossible thing the whole ordeal demanded of her. You can feel that this weighed heavily on the film-maker, and that honesty is what gives the moment its power.
There is a quiet grace note at the end, too. Hiba dreams of her mother, and her brother remarks that she has not visited him in his dreams, which I took as the film's gentle suggestion that the struggle, for all its cost, was worth something, that showing up matters even when it goes unthanked. Four stars. White Musk is tender, unsparing and deeply felt, a short that turns one family's private grief into something universal, and it left a real mark on me. A lovely, aching piece of work.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Sudan: You Will Die at Twenty (2019), Talking About Trees (2019), Dowry of Life (2013)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: I Will Be Alright (2026), FarEye (2026), To the North (2026)
