{"id":1057,"date":"2021-12-15T06:03:02","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T06:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/selection\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T09:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T09:46:08","slug":"selection","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/selection\/","title":{"rendered":"ALFILM SELECTION"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The full program for the 17th edition will be announced at the beginning of April! Look forward to an exciting selection of contemporary feature films, documentaries, and short film programs, complemented by inspiring discussions with filmmakers. The program will also include engaging panels and exclusive masterclasses.<\/p>\n

Stay up to date by following us on instagram <\/a>and signing up for our newsletter<\/a>. We can\u2019t wait to share more with you soon!<\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row disable_element=”yes”][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]Here we are, once again \u2014 and for the 16th time \u2014 at the threshold of a new edition of the Arab Film Festival Berlin.<\/strong> This edition unfolds in turbulent times for the Arab region shaped by devastating violence, new waves of displacement, and ongoing economic and political instability. Yet it is also marked by resolute resistance and the enduring hope for new beginnings. The films in this year\u2019s selection engage with many of the challenges faced by Arab communities in the region and the diaspora while also giving voice to the strivings for change, liberation, and prosperity. As such, the ALFILM Selection<\/strong> includes a wide range of feature fiction films, documentaries, and three short film programs.<\/p>\n

The plight of the Sudanese people \u2014 whose revolutionary hopes have been brutally thwarted under the weight of an atrocious war that has displaced nearly 10 million people \u2014 comes to the fore in Hind Meddeb\u2019s poetic Sudan, Remember Us<\/a>. Meanwhile, Gazan Tales<\/a> by Mahmoud Nabil Ahmed offers intimate insights into the everyday life of Palestinians in the besieged territory shortly before the outbreak of the all-out Israeli war that left the enclave in ruins, killing more than 50,000 people to date, and displacing almost the entire population.<\/p>\n

Scandar Copti\u2019s brilliantly scripted Happy Holidays<\/a> portrays a state of powerlessness and relinquished control, embodied by the struggle of a Palestinian middle-class family in Israel to cling to their privileges and preserve an illusion of “the good life\u201d. Freedom from the normative grip of bourgeois patriarchy, Copti shows us, is inseparable from that of the militarized violence that perpetuates the structural inequality of Palestinians. The Lebanese film Moondove<\/a> by Karim Kassem, although set in a different context, also gestures toward a similar state of powerlessness \u2014 or rather, a willing surrender to a pervasive sense of decay and loss that touches both people and nature: A condition exacerbated by the Lebanese state\u2019s failure to provide the inhabitants of a rural area with basic infrastructure.<\/p>\n

The war that struck Lebanon last year, causing a devastating loss in life and the destruction of neighborhoods, is also present in this year\u2019s selection \u2014 albeit from a highly unconventional perspective. In A Frown Gone Mad<\/a> by Omar Mismar, the clients of a beauty salon specializing in Botox and fillers share their thoughts on the looming war through personal stories and anecdotes. These unusual yet engaging conversations reveal an unyielding endurance in the face of adversity and unrelenting crisis. For some, even at the edge of hardship, there is always time to smooth out the traces of time.<\/p>\n

The hauntings of crushed revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt, and the unrealized yearning for a dignified life among the suffering majorities of both countries are palpable in their contemporary film productions, though often conveyed through nuanced forms of storytelling that navigate the pressures of increasing censorship. In the Tunisian film Red Path<\/a>, Lotfi Achour foregrounds the state’s complacency through deliberate ignorance and absence, failing to protect the poor inhabitants of the Mghila Mountain from the constant threat of landmines and the violence of militant jihadists who control the area. The film\u2019s narrative unfolds in a dreamlike register through images and painterly compositions rendered with remarkable precision. In the Egyptian film Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo<\/a> by Khaled Mansour, the main characters, Hasan and his dog Rambo, live in a world shaped by cruelty where the powerful dictate the rules and the weak are trampled upon. Threatened with eviction from their home, they embark on a thrilling journey in search of salvation. The journey sheds light on the daunting realities of contemporary Egypt where much of the country\u2019s younger generations live under the weight of poverty, fear, and a lack of prospects. Street dogs may be wretched but at least Rambo has a chance to escape.<\/p>\n

A shared theme in several documentaries in this year\u2019s selection \u2014 all of them their director\u2019s first feature \u2014 is the filmmakers\u2019 urge to explore the histories of their own parents and families, revealing entanglements between the personal and the broader sociopolitical contexts within which they exist. Bassam Mortada in Abo Zaabal 89<\/a>, Farah Kassem in We Are Inside<\/a>, and Leila Albayaty in From Abdul to Leila<\/a> each attempt to reconnect with their fathers, navigating through trauma, lost dreams, and untold secrets \u2014 whether in Cairo, Tripoli or Baghdad. Albayaty reflects on the migration trajectories of her own family and herself, as does Samira El Mouzghibati who explores the unspoken dimensions of her parents\u2019 migration from Morocco to Belgium in (Y)our Mother<\/a> \u2014 an experience that cast long shadows over the lives of her family members and shaped their relationships with others and with each other. At the heart of the narrative stands her mother. Her silence, her melancholy, and the gravitas etched into her face seem to reveal the deep imprint of a transgenerational wound.<\/p>\n

If the year was marked by a series of tragic events \u2014 from the ongoing massacres and dire humanitarian crises in Gaza and Sudan, to the recurrent Lebanon, Syria and Yemen \u2014 one major event sparked a shimmer of hope for the region: the fall of the Assad regime in Syria after a brutal war that devastated the country and displaced much of its population. Anas Zawahri\u2019s My Memory is Full of Ghosts<\/a> invites us to confront the layers of physical and emotional devastation the Syrian war has inflicted on the historic city of Homs and its inhabitants. The narrative poetically interweaves the accounts of several characters as they struggle to come to terms with their sense of time and place in a home that has become a dwelling for ghosts. Another Arab country long troubled by natural disasters, ethnic conflicts and a protracted civil war, Somalia remains largely ignored by both Arab and Western media. Mo Harawe’s film The Village Next to Paradise<\/a> offers a poignant portrait of life\u2019s hardships there, subtly hinting at the complicity of imperial powers in exacerbating the population\u2019s suffering.<\/p>\n

The opening and closing films of the festival\u2014To a Land Unknown<\/a> by Mehdi Fleifel and Yunan<\/a> by Ameer Fakher Eldin, respectively\u2014are two masterpieces that explore parallel trajectories of a condition that continues to overshadow the modern Arab existence: the diasporic condition. While Fleifel\u2019s film opens a window on the tragedy of Palestinian refugees stuck in an existential limbo at the gates of Europe, where every venture to cling to hope seems to inevitably break, Yunan<\/a> captures the torment of an exiled, middle-class Arab man who, burdened by estrangement, remains suspended within the memories of a home that can no longer exist.<\/p>\n

Over the past 16 years, ALFILM has remained committed to engaging with the visions, ambitions, and hopes for change, liberation, and transformation within our communities\u2014both in the region and in the diaspora. With an insatiable passion for justice and an ardent love for the art of cinema, we continue to cultivate spaces for reflection, resistance, and interconnection. This year, we look forward to sharing this mission once again with our audience in Berlin\u2014and for many years to come.<\/p>\n

Artistic Director
\nIskandar Abdalla<\/strong>[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]ALFILM, now in its 17th edition, stands on the cusp of adulthood. It comes of age in dire times, when many of the principles and foundations once thought inviolable are being called into question: from the sanctity of human life to the basic tenets of freedom of expression. The Arabic-speaking region and its diaspora communities, in particular, have become a backdrop against which these very foundations are being tested to their limits; sites where the normalization of dehumanizing discourses and practices has taken hold as commonplace: genocidal assaults in Sudan and Gaza, the ongoing bombardment of Lebanon and the displacement of hundreds of thousands from its southern regions, alongside a surge in repressive measures, ecological crises, and economic inequalities fuelled by wars, imperial interventions, deep-seated corruption and neoliberal politics.<\/p>\n

The films in this year\u2019s Selection bear the marks of grief, anxiety, frustration, and disillusionment with the current state of the world. They contend with the fragility of grand narratives and schemas of being that, long left unquestioned, have driven life itself to the edge\u2014sanctioning heinous forms of violence under the guise of what is called \u201cprogress,\u201d while reinforcing racial, gendered, and economic hierarchies. And they grapple with the deep and lasting effects the latter leave on the intimate and the personal: on family ties, bonds of love, attachments to place, time, history, and to one\u2019s own body. In doing so, they carve out ways of living against death, of resisting a violence unbound, and of nurturing forms of restoration among ruin and rubble.<\/p>\n

Tales of the Wounded Land<\/a> by Abbas Fahdel and The Lions by the River Tigris<\/a> by Zaradasht Ahmed are both poignant accounts of the art of survival\u2014the former in southern Lebanon, the latter in Mosul, northern Iraq. They bear witness to a stubborn insistence on the possibility of a future, as homes are reduced to rubble and memories are stripped of their tangible traces. In such conditions, restoration and renewal become imperatives, acts of dignity and of fidelity to life itself. Fatma Hassona\u2019s unwavering smile in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk<\/a> by Sepideh Farsi, and the jokes and songs of performer Aloosh in The Clown of Gaza<\/a> by Abdulrahman Sabbah, are not merely markers of resilience under the weight of the atrocious realities of the assault on Gaza; they also gesture toward the performativity of survival in times of ultimate loss: when unjust death becomes ordinary, to enact life is a rebellious act, through which the doomed reclaim its sanctity.<\/p>\n

Why Do I See You in Everything?<\/a> by Syrian filmmaker Rand Abou Fakher poetically interrogates the afterlives of the destruction of home in exile, while also tracing how comradeship can become a means of remaking home and holding on to life. Home Movie on Location<\/a> by German-Egyptian filmmaker Viola Shafik, in turn, reckons with the labour of making home and forging belonging across places, languages, and in relation to the art of cinema. Exile<\/a> by Mehdi Hmili and Roqia<\/a> by Yanis Koussim confront the haunting of unredressed violence in their respective landscapes\u2014post-revolutionary Tunisia and post-civil war Algeria\u2014tracing its lingering imprint on the present while gesturing toward a future in which injustice can no longer remain unaccounted for. In doing so, both films repurpose genre conventions\u2014thriller in Exile and horror in Roqia\u2014reshaping them in accordance with the aesthetic and historical sensibilities that mark their respective societies.
\nSome films resort to history in ways that counter oblivion and reframe the present in light of the conditions that have shaped its (im)possibilities. Palestine 36<\/a> by Annemarie Jacir recalls an often overlooked chapter of Palestinian resistance against occupation and dispossession, refocusing attention on the colonial formations that preceded and prepared the ground for the Nakba, as well as on their ongoing structural embeddedness in the lives of Palestinians today. El-Sett<\/a> by Marwan Hamed revisits the legacy of an extraordinary woman, Umm Kulthum (1898-1975), whose life and artistic trajectory illuminate Egypt\u2019s entanglements with modernity, defeat, and forms of resilience.<\/p>\n

The President\u2019s Cake<\/a> by Hasan Hadi refocuses, through the perspective of a young girl, on Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, while also tracing what it meant to live in a country shaped by sanctions and severe shortages of resources\u2014measures that ultimately entrenched repressive regimes and intensified the suffering of their populations. Flana<\/a> by Zahraa Ghandour invites us to reckon with the devastating effects of political oppression and subsequent invasion, as shaped by gendered structures and inscribed in the intimate dimensions of being a woman, tracing the stories of women in Iraq who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.<\/p>\n

Habibi Hussein<\/a> by Alex Bakri and Thank You for Banking With Us!<\/a> by Laila Abbas take us to the occupied West Bank, offering insights into everyday life in Jenin and Ramallah from distinct perspectives and lived experiences. While the former deconstructs the discourse of \u201ccharity for peace\u201d by recentring the life of a cinema worker, Hussein\u2014whose labour and knowledge are simultaneously exploited and pushed to the margins by the very logic of that discourse\u2014the latter foregrounds the gendered burden of navigating a society shaped by the double bind of occupation and traditions.<\/p>\n

Those Who Watch Over<\/a> by Karima Sa\u00efdi takes us to the brink of life, to its encounter with death, following a group of mourners from diverse backgrounds and religious affiliations in their journeys to grieve, to process loss, and to carve out meaning from the ephemerality of life. Life After Siham<\/a> by Namir Abdel Messeeh from Egypt portrays the filmmaker\u2019s attempt to imagine life after the death of his mother, repurposing the narrative of a film once planned about her that could never come to be. Weaving together recollections from family archives\u2014with all their lapses and silences\u2014and footage from films by Youssef Chahine, it unfolds as a deeply personal account that reexamines broader questions of migration, belonging, defeat, and oppression, and their gendered and affective structures.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Selection is the largest in the history of ALFILM. It features several other films from Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as three short film programmes\u2014all works that propose innovative forms of storytelling, unpack postcolonial predicaments, socio-economic tensions, and ecological crises, and explore how these shape our experiences of living and loving, how we perceive life, and what we come to fear in death.<\/p>\n

In addition, ALFILM honours and pays tribute to several figures who have enriched Arab cinema through their outstanding achievements and distinctive talents, foremost among them Onsi Abou Seif, the prominent art director and production designer. We also honor the memory of those who have left us: the legendary Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, on the occasion of his centenary, Egyptian filmmaker Daoud Abdel Sayed, and Palestinian actor Mohamed Bakri.<\/p>\n

Through the various activities this year\u2019s edition presents beyond the screenings, we seek to emphasize the festival\u2019s function as a space for communing and (self-)empowerment. It is not enough to simply know the world as it is presented to us through cinema. Rather, we must deploy cinema as a tool for producing forms of knowledge that empower, that render life liveable and bearable.[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

Films of the 17th ALFILM SELECTION<\/h2>\n

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[vc_row][vc_column][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row disable_element=”yes”][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””] The full program for the 17th edition will be announced at the beginning of April! Look forward…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8859,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1057","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":57,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9708,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1057\/revisions\/9708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}