THE ARAB FILM Festival is not only an increasingly crucial outlet for authentic voices and perspectives above the media-saturating din of stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims, it's kept pace with some of the most exciting cinematic work to emerge from both traditional and newly burgeoning film centers of the Arabic-speaking world.

This year's ninth annual lineup of over 40 films – which gets rolling this Friday night at the Castro with two US premieres, Ruba Naddah's Sabah and Tony Gatlif's Exils – has much to offer in both respects. Among a full range of short subjects, documentaries, and features, for example, there's unfamiliar terrain indeed in the Bay Area premiere of Ghassan Salhab's excellent Terra Incognito (2002), a sharply written, dreamily paced metatour of present-day Beirut, seen through the obsessions of a circle of mostly thirtysomething adults – some returning to the city, others determined to leave, all profoundly and ironically solitary. Each tries in idiosyncratic ways to get hold of, define, shape, fit into, escape, invent, and reinvent this city of endless frustration and desire. Beautifully directed and edited, it adds up to a strange, half-conscious limbo, a hip and moody layering and problematizing of place and meaning to which Salhab's camera becomes an intimate party.

The most anticipated Bay Area premiere this year is surely the closing feature, Door to the Sun, a four-hour-long saga of the Palestine-Israel conflict in the story of a single Palestinian family. Egyptian director Yousry Nassrallah's highly acclaimed 2004 film is adapted from the novel of the same title, by Elias Khoury (who cowrote the screenplay with Nassrallah). Khoury, probably the most important modernist writer in Arabic today, is the first to have dealt explicitly in fiction with the war of 1948, or what the Arab natives of Palestine call the Naqba (the "catastrophe"), which led to the establishment of Israel and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. (Khoury's daughter Abla Khoury, incidentally, has a principal role in Terra Incognita as the darkly poetic malcontent Leila.)

Among the mix of documentaries, three from Iraq are worth highlighting: Sean McAllister's specific look at life under occupation, Liberace of Baghdad, a recent award-winner at Sundance; his earlier Minders (1998), which treats life under Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime; and first-time filmmaker Hayder Mousa Daffarr's The Dream of the Sparrows, a raw, somewhat amateurish but inescapably authentic, potent, and all-too-rare look at the lives and responses of ordinary Iraqis under the US occupation from late 2003 to the present. (Robert Avila)

'The 9th Annual Arab Film Festival.' Sept. 23-Oct. 2. See Film listings for venue information. For tickets ($5-$15) and a complete schedule, call (415) 564-1100 or visit www.aff.org.