Eid al-Adha arrives each year with imagery that should, by any cinematic logic, lend itself naturally to film.Across Muslim countries, cattle overtake streets and household courtyards. Families negotiate over the price of cows and goats with the seriousness of a major financial transaction. Children form attachments to animals they know will soon be sacrificed. Butchers work through the morning while relatives portion meat into careful distributions for neighbors and the poor. The festival transforms public space, private emotion and economic life all at once.Yet Eid al-Adha has generated remarkably little cinema.This absence becomes clearer when compared with the treatment of other religious festivals. Christmas essentially functions as an industrial category. Hollywood has produced hundreds of Christmas films, from domestic dramas to romantic comedies to children’s animation. The holiday offers filmmakers a familiar emotional framework that involves family reunion, nostalgia, generosity, loneliness resolved through ritual.Jewish holidays and traditions have similarly shaped films concerned with memory, migration, and identity. Hindu festivals, particularly Diwali and Durga Puja, regularly appear in Indian cinema as emotional and visual centrepieces. Eid al-Adha, by contrast, remains largely peripheral even in Muslim-majority film industries.Part of the reason lies in the festival itself. Eid al-Adha is not fundamentally celebratory in the way Christmas or Diwali are commonly portrayed on screen. Its theological foundation is sacrifice. The holiday commemorates prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to surrender what he loved most in obedience to God.The ritual sacrifice of animals is not a symbolic decoration attached to the festival; it is the festival’s central act. That creates difficulties for commercial cinema, which generally prefers stories structured around aspiration or redemption rather than surrender and moral obligation.The result is that when Eid appears in film, it is usually Eid ul-Fitr rather than Eid al-Adha. Ramzan and its concluding celebrations are easier to aestheticise. Communal meals, lights, crowded markets, prayer, reunion. Eid al-Adha contains more ambiguity.A Yemeni boy hugs a goat at the Al-Ahad (Sunday) livestock market in Wadi Al-Dhabab, west of Taiz, Yemen, Sunday, May 24, 2026, ahead of Eid al-Adha. Photo: Abdulnasser Alseddik/AP.It asks uncomfortable questions about devotion, hierarchy, duty and loss. Even within Muslim societies, the festival often produces emotional contradictions that filmmakers may find difficult to translate into mainstream narrative. A few films, however, have approached these themes with unusual seriousness.Films focusing the philosophical aspectsA Son, directed by Mehdi Barsaoui and released in 2019, is among the clearest examples. The film follows a Tunisian family whose young son is critically injured in an attack and urgently requires a liver transplant. During the medical process, the father discovers that the child may not biologically be his. The storyline then follows an examination of paternal responsibility under moral pressure.The film never explicitly positions itself as an Eid al-Adha story. Yet its structure mirrors the philosophical logic of qurbani. The father is forced into a situation where sacrifice becomes unavoidable, but the sacrifice is not ceremonial. It is psychological and existential. The question is not whether he loves the child, but whether love can survive humiliation, and the collapse of certainty.The factor that makes A Son effective is its refusal to sentimentalise sacrifice. Modern cinema often treats sacrifice as heroic spectacle: a climactic gesture performed by morally uncomplicated characters.The film instead depicts sacrifice as destabilising. The father’s crisis is internal before it becomes ethical. His identity, masculinity and authority are all implicated in the decision he must make. In this sense, the film engages more honestly with the spiritual architecture of Eid al-Adha than many explicitly religious productions.A different but equally revealing approach appears in Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013, dir., Chan-kyong Park), a quieter Central Asian drama rooted in rural Muslim life. Here, Eid al-Adha is treated as social atmosphere instead of a narrative spectacle. The film observes village rituals surrounding sacrifice with restraint: livestock preparation, communal meals, intergenerational conversations and the emotional tension between tradition and modernity.One of the film’s most effective choices is its focus on children. In many Muslim societies, Eid al-Adha is often a child’s first direct encounter with mortality and ritual sacrifice. Children spend days caring for animals that will later be slaughtered. The emotional contradiction is deliberate. The ritual is meant to teach detachment, charity, and obedience, but it also produces grief. Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits captures this dynamic without overstatement. The emotional force comes precisely from how ordinary the ritual appears within the village’s social order.The film also reflects another reality often absent from global portrayals of Muslim festivals … that is Eid al-Adha is deeply economic.In countries from Bangladesh to Kazakhstan, purchasing sacrificial animals represents a significant financial burden for lower- and middle-income households. The festival temporarily reorganizes local economies around livestock, transport, butchery, and food distribution.This economic dimension gives Eid al-Adha a material texture rarely explored in cinema, despite its obvious narrative potential.Unobvious reasons behind the absenceBangladesh offers a particularly striking example of this absence. Every year, Eid al-Adha radically alters urban life. Temporary cattle markets emerge across Dhaka. Apartment complexes become improvised animal shelters. Rural migration patterns reverse as families return home. Television channels respond with seasonal programming, including some telefilms and dramas loosely centred on cow markets or family tensions.A boy buys an ice cream at a stall inside Dubai Mall on the first day of the Eid al-Adha holiday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday, May 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)These productions occasionally produce sharp observations about class and social change. Some focus on migrant workers unable to afford qurbani. Others depict urban middle-class families treating the ritual as social performance rather than religious obligation. But almost all remain confined to television’s seasonal cycle. They are produced quickly, aired during the holiday week, and then largely forgotten.Bangladeshi cinema has not produced a major feature film devoted seriously to Eid al-Adha. This is notable because the festival contains many of the elements filmmakers typically seek: spectacle, emotional conflict, social hierarchy, and moral tension. The absence suggests a broader hesitation within Muslim-majority film industries to engage directly with religious ritual outside either devotional storytelling or broad comedy.There are practical reasons for this. Depicting animal sacrifice on screen risks controversy or accusations of insensitivity from international audiences unfamiliar with the ritual context. At the same time, treating the festival too reverently can reduce a film to sermonising. Many filmmakers therefore avoid the subject altogether.But the absence also reflects a larger imbalance in global cinematic language. Western film industries have spent decades developing visual grammars around Christmas and other familiar holidays. Audiences instantly recognise these symbolic cues: snow, decorated trees, church bells, family dinners. Eid al-Adha lacks an equivalent cinematic vocabulary, even though it shapes the emotional lives of hundreds of millions of people.The few films that do engage seriously with themes of sacrifice, obligation and surrender suggest what is possible. A Son and Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits avoid reducing Eid al-Adha to exotic imagery or ritual display. They approach the festival’s underlying philosophy: that sacrifice is not primarily about loss, but about the moral test created by attachment itself. That remains a difficult idea for commercial cinema.And it is also what makes Eid al-Adha one of the most cinematically underexplored religious festivals in the world.Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist.