{"id":1059,"date":"2021-12-15T06:02:47","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T06:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/spotlight\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:57:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:57:41","slug":"spotlight","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/spotlight\/","title":{"rendered":"ALFILM SPOTLIGHT"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sudan: A New Projection<\/h1>\n

Retrospectives, Revolutions, and Restorations<\/h1>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row disable_element=”yes”][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]This program is grounded in a dual reality: one that is both material and epistemological. Sudan is being systematically and brutally destroyed before our very eyes. At the same time, its images are constantly reproduced and disseminated within a global visual economy that continues to reduce its history and complexity to ready-made templates of \u201ccrisis,\u201d \u201cwar,\u201d and \u201chumanitarian relief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, the question we should pose is not so much \u201cWhat is happening in Sudan?\u201d but how is what is happening made visible and construed with meaning? Who has the authority over narratives, who is granted the position of witness? Who is urged to offer their pain as material for media consumption?<\/p>\n

From this perspective, \u201cSudan: A New Projection\u2014Retrospectives, Revolutions, and Restorations\u201d proposes a reading of Sudanese cinema that goes beyond seeing it as representative of a devastated land. Instead, we propose viewing the works of Sudanese filmmakers as practices of knowledge, resistance, and restoration.<\/p>\n

The films in this program\u2014from their production to the generations of their filmmakers\u2014re-examine the conditions that render an event visible and amenable to filming in the first place: the conditions of seeing, preservation, and the circulation of memory. Taken together, these films shift Sudan\u2019s position from an \u201cobject\u201d of observation to a \u201csubject\u201d in the global scene. Sudanese filmmakers and film subjects alike thus emerge as producers of meaning, actively shaping their relationship to the world, to the image, and to the archive.<\/p>\n

In this program, place appears as a material structure that speaks\u2014as a space of conflict, of class formation and relations of power, but also of imagination. It becomes a domain for testing the scope and limits of gender boundaries, of public presence, and of the body\u2019s potentiality in societies structured by exclusion and discipline. In these films, peripheries emerge as sites for mapping power relations and inequalities, where the structural violence of the state, market logic, and individualism converge. We glimpse the routines of daily labor not simply as labor, but as part of an entire economy sustained by exploitation and the reproduction of inequality. In this sense, carrying bricks, pressing oil, or bearing the weight of the world itself becomes a form of physical labor that remains invisible until cinema renders it politically legible.<\/p>\n

The films in this program confront us with a central question: how can we depict cities when the destruction of war renders their depiction impossible? Imagination comes to the fore here as a means of reconstructing fractured time, torn cities, and a memory that can no longer be accessed except through evocation, and at times through representation. In this sense, The New Projection marks one step within a broader constellation of attempts to preserve Sudan even as it faces an overwhelming onslaught that threatens to collapse, occupy, or erase it. This resonates across the contemporary works presented in the program, extending into an inquiry into how questions of land intersect with gender, agricultural economies, and the politics of the future. Here, the discourse of \u201cdevelopment\u201d reappears as an urge to reorganize property, labor, desire, and their possible futures.<\/p>\n

When films are restored and recalled, a set of questions resurfaces: Who owns the archive? Who decides what remains? And what merits restoration, circulation, and visibility? We continue to pose these questions, reminded, in watching these films, that the history of the image in Sudan was never marginal or incomplete; rather, it was pushed to the margins through deliberate neglect, wars, a lack of institutions, and unequal access to the tools of preservation and circulation.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, I would like to emphasize that this year\u2019s Spotlight on Sudan does not advocate for a \u201cnational dossier\u201d in a narrow, celebratory, or representational sense, but rather proposes a different ethics of programming. As much as it seeks to avoid viewing Sudan as a distant place, it also reflects on how images themselves are produced; how power takes shape within festivals, markets, and archives across time and place. This program, therefore, does not ask audiences to \u201cget to know\u201d Sudan. Rather, it invites us to reconsider the regimes of vision that organize the world at large: Who is subjected to the gaze? Who is granted credibility? Who owns the past, and who has the right to speak in the name of the present?
\nSudanese cinema, in this sense, is not merely an offshoot of catastrophe, but an ongoing practice of knowledge, of bearing witness, and of remaking the world from within.
\nTalal Afifi[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row disable_element=”yes”][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

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

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Canceled Futures, Endless Pasts.<\/h1>\n

Speculative Fiction on and Archival Subversions of the (Post)colonial Condition.<\/h2>\n

To reduce colonialism in connection with Arab societies to a linear recollection of familiar historical episodes \u2013 occupation, resistance, liberation, an epilogue on the lingering remnants of the colonial past, perhaps faded with time \u2013 is to oversimplify its complexities. Colonialism in the region is not a past we recall with the agony of loss tempered by the pride of national restoration. Instead, it is a present masquerading as the past, a tapestry of canceled futures that await to be reclaimed, so that they might be rendered livable.<\/span><\/p>\n

As anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler has remarked, \u201ccolonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems [… as far as] they may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns.\u201d From this perspective, and given the pervasive entanglement of the colonial past with the very present it supposedly precedes, attempting to unwrap coloniality from the course of things\u2014the modes of life, sociability, and political economy of the region\u2014seems unfeasible without questioning these very modes themselves. What could our existence have been otherwise?<\/span><\/p>\n

ALFILM Spotlight\u2019s program<\/strong> for the 16th edition presents a selection of films, many of which are recent productions and each of which\u2014albeit in divergent styles and contexts\u2014poses that same question while addressing the predicaments of the Arab region and its inhabitants. Whether through speculative fiction and ventures into magical world-building or subversive interventions into archival material that unravels the occlusions and lapses underpinning dominant narratives and images, the films in this program invite us to contemplate and critically engage with coloniality and its legacies in a different light. They do so not merely by representing the realities shaped by the lives and afterlives of colonialism\u2014exploitation, dispossession, injustices, oppressive regimes and racist violence\u2014 but by subverting the inevitable realities forged by coloniality, unsettling what we have long established as normal. The (post)colonial condition is omnipresent across the films of this Spotlight program<\/strong>, but instead of being taken for granted, it is challenged and reimagined at every turn, inviting the emergence of new worlds. A common denominator here is namely the embrace of futurity as a mode of critically narrating and engaging with present conditions, rather than merely lingering on the ruins of the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

In Silent Storms<\/a> (2024), Franco-Algerian filmmaker Dania Reymond depicts a mysterious yellow dust rising from a rural plain where atrocities of French colonialism, as well as the ensuing civil war took place. In this unnamed land that strongly resembles Algeria, the dust will soon transform into raging sand storms that sweep the country, heralding a natural catastrophe. Meanwhile, the dead return\u2014or refuse to depart\u2014awakening the spectres of an unresolved, violent past. Can the present reconcile itself with the past? Can the living endure a life haunted by those who have returned from death?<\/span><\/p>\n

In a similar vein, three revenants resurface in a remote Tunisian town in Agora<\/a> by Ala Eddine Slim (2024). Their peculiar return\u2014or rather, their insusceptibility to final and definite death\u2014unsettles the inhabitants, their families, and the authorities. Only animals seem to grasp the essence of what is happening. The mystery surrounding their presence\u2014neither truly alive nor dead\u2014seems to function as a political commentary on Tunisia’s suspended present, a nation trapped in its postcolonial trauma. In Perfumed with Mint<\/a> (2024), the debut feature of Egyptian filmmaker Muhammad Hamdy, we traverse a surreal universe of shadows and shrines, witnessing the afterlives of the dead as mint patches growing on the bodies of their relatives. It is never clear whether what we see is the beyond, the hallucinations from a hashish cloud, or a vision of the living world perishing under the forces of fear. The allusion to the plight of Egyptians\u2014after a vanquished revolution and under the grip of an omnipotent regime of fear that merely replaces one face of tyranny with another\u2014remains a tangible thread within the peculiarities that unfold.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Animalia<\/a> (2023), the debut feature of French-Moroccan director Sofia Alaoui, Ouma\u00efma, the main protagonist, awaits the birth of her child in a world itself on the threshold of a new birth\u2014one where humans and nonhumans are interconnected, and nature regains its mastery by invoking the supernatural. Here, the postcolonial appears poised to transcend its coloniality, as the posthuman comes to the fore. In Lyd<\/a> (2023) by Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis, the Palestinian city recounts its own history\u2014from the flourishing era under Ottoman rule, through the thriving modernization process of the early 20th century, all the way to the British occupation that was followed by the Nakba, and the subsequent massacres and waves of displacement. The film alternates between the city\u2019s history, its present, and an animated counterfactual history\u2014a speculative account of what the city might have become if colonialism had never occurred. A Fidai Film<\/a> (2024) by Kamal Aljafari also attempts to construct an account of Palestine before and after the Nakba\u2014not necessarily by imagining a precolonial condition, as is the case in Lyd but rather by overriding the colonial image, by hijacking its narrative, and forging a counter-archive that dwells on subverting\u2014if not sabotaging\u2014a multifaceted collection of footage authored by power. Based on his journey with this film and his earlier projects, Kamal Aljafari will also give a masterclass, reflecting on the possibilities of decolonial approaches of dealing with archival material.<\/span><\/p>\n

True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956<\/a> (2023) is a fictional adaptation of the biography of Frantz Fanon (1925\u20131961), a prominent key figure of the decolonial movement. Based on archival research, documentary films, and interviews with contemporary witnesses, director Abdenour Zahzah focuses on the time Fanon spent working at a psychiatric clinic in Blida, Algeria. The film highlights how Fanon\u2019s confrontation with colonial psychiatric practices influenced his later struggle against racism and for decolonization. The film, in black and white with an extraordinarily long title, mimics the language of historical archival footage while simultaneously infusing it with a breath of fiction that only reaffirms its contemporary resonance. On a different note, Hiding Saddam Hussein<\/a> by Halkawt Mustafa recounts the extraordinary hunt for the former Iraqi dictator by American occupation forces, shedding light on the neo-colonial politics that have fractured Iraq\u2019s social fabric for decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aside from recent productions, the Spotlight program features two special screenings. The first adopts a decolonial approach, reversing the gaze onto German cinema and its more recent history, while the second pays tribute to a classic landmark of anti-colonial Arab cinema. In the documentary My Name is Not Ali<\/a> (2011), Viola Shafik retraces the forgotten backstory of one of the most iconic films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder\u2019s filmography Angst essen Seele auf (1974). While Fassbinder\u2019s film is often hailed as pioneering in addressing migration and post-war racism in Germany, Shafik presents a counter-narrative by exploring the tragic life of its lead actor, El Hedi Ben Salem. Her documentary unravels shocking episodes that expose the pervasive racism, abuse, and exploitation also present within the leftist film scene in West Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Chronicle of the Years of Fire<\/a> (1975), Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina depicts an epic saga of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism. It is the first \u2014 and so far only \u2014 Arab film to win the Palme d\u2019Or at Cannes. Lakhdar-Hamina described his work as an attempt to \u201crecount, with dignity and nobility, this uprising that then became the Algerian Revolution[…] an uprising not only against the colonizer, but against a certain human condition.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

Iskandar Abdalla<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Artsitic Director<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””] Sudan: A New Projection Retrospectives, Revolutions, and Restorations [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row disable_element=”yes”][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]This program is grounded in a dual reality:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1059","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1059","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=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":70,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9668,"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1059\/revisions\/9668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfilm.berlin\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}