To boycott or not to boycott? That was the existential question facing Middle Eastern filmmakers before the recently concluded Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale).
Germany has not been hospitable to voices critical of Israel since 7 October, 2023. Numerous artists and human rights activists, from iconic American photographer Nan Goldin to Italian UN official Francesca Albanese, have been targeted by the country’s media for their criticism of Berlin’s unrepentant support for the Zionist state.
Last year’s Berlinale failed to prove to the world that it is the democratic haven it always presented itself to be.
This year was no different. At the premiere of Queerpanorama, a feature which premiered at the Panorama competition, a speech written by Iranian actor Erfan Shekarriz in solidarity with the Palestinian cause was recited by Hong Kong director Jun Li and contained the slogan “From the River to the Sea”.
As per habit in Germany, all hell broke loose. The moderator of the discussion, in yet another instance in which the Berlinale threw its filmmakers under the bus, condemned Li’s statement before the German police proceeded to investigate the Hong Kong director.
The mayor of Berlin and member of the ruling Christian Democrats party (CDU), Kai Wegner, meanwhile, described Li’s statement as “antisemitic”.
“For me, this is unacceptable. Anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel must have no place at the Berlinale,” he posted on his X account.
Read More »
To put things into perspective, the slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is criminalised in Germany.
"From the river to the sea — the Israeli flag is all you'll see" is not.
The Honorary Golden Bear recipient and vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, Tilda Swinton, also came under fire for she had “a great deal of respect for BDS”.
“I think about it a lot," Swinton said of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.
Amid this hullabaloo, it was no wonder that the Middle Eastern selection of Berlinale 2025 was largely humdrum: a middlebrow slate heavy on predictably safe politics and low on invention.
The region’s major film auteurs and hot young talents alike have opted to steer away from Berlin, trying their luck with the more politically open and less hostile festivals like Cannes or Venice.
Yunan
The most high-profile title of the selection - and by far the most disappointing Middle Eastern film of the year - was Yunan, Ameer Fakher Eldin’s much anticipated sophomore effort, and the most depoliticised Middle Eastern offering in the lineup.
The Hamburg-based filmmaker, whose parents hail from the occupied Golan Heights, made waves with his stunning debut, The Stranger (2021), a haunting study of estrangement and loss that made history by being the first film shot in the Israel-occupied Syrian territory.
Fakher Eldin swaps the Golan Heights for the North Sea in this languid account of an emotionally wounded, creatively blocked middle-aged Arab novelist (Lebanese star Georges Khabbaz) who seeks respite, or perhaps a final resting place, in a picturesque island, away from his Hamburg residence.
A chance encounter with an elderly German woman (screen legend Hanna Schygulla) graciously lends him a lifeline and gives him a new-found reason to carry on.
Yunan ultimately proves to be a hollow exploration of Arab exile (Red Balloon Film)
Fakher Eldin maintains the details of the writer’s spiritual malaise under wraps.
We see him earlier calling up his Alzheimer-stricken mother in an unnamed Arab country as she recounts a story of a damned shepherd from whom he draws inspiration for his new book.
Yet we never know exactly what’s plaguing his soul until the last five minutes of the picture when it’s finally revealed, and explicitly pronounced, that the weight of exile has been responsible for his lengthy state of suspended existence.
Until those very last five minutes, the viewer is left scrambling to decipher the novelist’s simmering agony as Fakher Eldin remains reluctant throughout to provide even a faint hint of the rationale behind his condition.
Read More »
There’s a fine line between constructively evocative ambiguity and self-involved, stubbornly insular narration.
Yunan falls into the trap of the latter, leading to a highly problematic standardisation and flattening of Arab exile – a complex experience shaped by class, politics, and disparate psychological factors.
Despite its sweeping splendour, Fakher Eldin’s imagery ultimately proves to be hollow, illustrating once again that visual beauty alone does not make for soulful, thoughtful filmmaking.
The suggested notion that travel, that a mere change of scenery, can heal the soul is naive, and debunked most famously in Red Desert (1964), Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni’s piercing view of industrial alienation.
Casting Hanna Schygulla as the kind stranger who transpires to be the novelist’s white saviour, meanwhile, underlines Fakher Eldin’s political and philosophical limits.
Khartoum
Less expansive in scope but more earnest in its intentions was Khartoum, an omnibus film directed by four Sudanese filmmakers and a Brit that documents the 2023 Sudan civil war from the point of views of five of its residents.
The project was initiated in 2022 as a panorama of the everyday lives of residents in the Sudanese capital before the conflict between the Sudanese army and Rapid Support Forces abruptly and radically transformed the purpose of the project.
Each of the film’s subjects have humble aspirations: little boys Lokain and Wilson collect discarded bottles to provide for themselves; single mother Khadmallah works to grow her tea stall into a flourishing enterprise; Jawad volunteers in his local resistance movement against the military autocracy; and civil servant Majdi, who is bound by familial duties, strives for hard-fought freedom.
The five filmmakers blend recorded footage from before 2023 with animation and dramatised reenactments of violence in the wake of the war.
Realised with remarkable sensitivity and shot with distinctive lyricism that expands the parameters of the project's format, Khartoum never solely relies on its urgent politics to lift the picture up; its mature, striking artistry is inseparable from its unsentimental humanism.
The scant representation of the Sudanese war on screen is enough to render Khartoum required viewing, but the docu-fiction – which had its world premiere in Sundance in January – is an accomplished picture on its own right.
It is a rich, multilayered kaleidoscope of ordinary people repeatedly forced to confront extraordinary circumstances.
The self-reflexive use of image-making as a way of conjuring up meaning from the senselessness and insidiousness of the war is a testament to cinema’s undiminished therapeutic power.
At a time when the plight of the Sudanese refugees is undermined throughout a region that remains inhospitable to black Africans, Khartoum comes off as an important and timely reminder of the ongoing bloodshed that has displaced 11 million Sudanese thus far. It is a reminder of the violence that the world continues to turn a blind eye to, and of the country, and its people.
By a considerable margin, Khartoum was the standout Arab film of the Berlinale.
The Tale of Daye’s Family
If Khartoum is a lesson on dignified humanism, the Egyptian entry The Tale of Daye’s Family is a case of insufferable over-sentimentalism.
Daye – which had its world premiere last December at the Red Sea Film Fest – is the sophomore cinematic effort of Egyptian director Karim El-Shenawy, whose 2018 debut, Gunshot, sparked the anger of leftist circles for absolving the Egyptian police of killing protests during the 2011 revolution.
El-Shenawy has since embarked on a successful TV career that included a number of hit Ramadan series.
The sentimentality of Egyptian TV dramas is front and centre in this feel-good, quasi fairytale about the eponymous Nubian albino 14-year-old, played by Badr Mohammead, the sole saving grace of the film.
The Tale of Daye’s Family suffers from an overly contrived sentimentality (BluePrint Productions)
Daye embarks on a road trip from his hometown of Aswan to Cairo with his devoted Christian teacher (Saudi star Aseel Omran), overprotective mother (Sudanese actress Islam Mubarak) and jealous sister (Haneen Saeed) in order to catch an audition for the Arabic version of The Voice.
El-Shenawy does not shy away from depicting the bullying that the meek, talented, Daye is habitually subjected to. But this prejudice, which we only witness a tempered down version of, is presented as a mere reality of school life, rather than an indictment of an increasingly belligerent Egyptian society, mired in bigotry.
In this utopian Egypt, everyone turns out to be compassionate and tolerant and selfless; in this utopian Egypt, anybody with determination and sincerity can become whoever they want to become.
The gorgeous visuals by director of photography, Abdelsalam Moussa, is subjugated in order to paint a photoshopped view of an Egypt culled more from PSAs than anything resembling reality.
This watered-down treatment of the often-persecuted albinos in Egypt blights the filmmakers’ intention of raising awareness about the community.
No Beast. So Fierce.
More odious was No Beast. So Fierce., the fourth and arguably worst feature by German-Afghani filmmaker, Burhan Qurbani.
A reworking of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the film casts Arabs in the roles of the houses of York and Lancaster.
No Beast is the kind of orientalist hogwash where Palestinian star Hiam Abbass stands out for being the sole character in the picture that speaks Arabic.
Our critic criticises No Beast. So Fierce. for its exoticisation of its Arab subjects (Sommerhaus-Port au Prince Pictures)
It is also features some of the most unintentionally hilarious Arabic dialogue featured in a European film in recent memory.
With no socio-political context provided, the self-congratulatory stylisation of No Beast quickly runs thin as it sluggishly salivates for relevance in its waning moments.
Contrary to what the background of its director may suggest, No Beast is a disposable film, conceived from white gaze, for a small western audience fetishising Arab exotism.
Other regional offerings
Iran did not fare well in Berlinale 2025, scoring a solitary representation with 1001 Frames, the debut feature by Iranian-American director Mehrnoush Alia.
A conceptual experiment whereby an unseen famous director attempts to seduce a slew of actresses auditioning for the role of Scheherazade in a new adaptation of A Thousand and One Nights.
Alia uses the differences of her female subjects to explore every facet of the abuse of power in the still male-dominated Iranian film industry.
Yet the film never transcends its narrow experimental parameters, never managing to build tension due to the rigidity of a static structure that grows tiresome by the halfway mark.
The interactions between the director and his victims, meanwhile, are uneven: ranging from the intricate and shrewdly revealing to the indolent and terribly obvious.
1001 Frames is a superfluous and pointless fleshing out of Alia’s more successful 2015 short, Scheherazade, which explores the same power dynamics, albeit more concisely and efficiently.
1001 Frames is an exploration of male exploitation of women in the Iranian film industry (Maaa Film)
A more successful genre offering was Confidante, the fourth feature by the Turkish-French duo Cagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti.
Set in Ankara on the eve of the devastating 1999 Izmit earthquake, this chamber piece revolves around a phone sex operator who juggles her powerful clients to save a young caller trapped in the rubble.
A rather familiar tale of a lone brave woman accidently thrust in a battle against governmental corruption and patriarchal violence, Confidante manoeuvres genre trappings by posing intriguing ethical questions about consequentialism, the moral complexity of forgiveness, and the waywardness of justice.
A lean, taut, thriller that employs its single location to a maximum effect, Confidante is the rarest of Turkish exports: mature genre filmmaking with solid entertainment value and food for thought.
Saadet Aksoy stars in Turkish-French duo Cagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti's Confidante (Les Films du Tambour)
A number of documentaries explored the little-known history of right-wing terrorism against immigrants in Germany. The first was Martina Priessner’s The Moelln Letters, a recounting of the 1992 arson attack in the titular northernmost Germany city – the first fatal case of far-right extremism that saw houses of migrants’ homes set on fire.
The central figure of the film is Ibrahim Arslan who lost his sister, his cousin, and his grandmother in the attack.
Arslan received hundreds of letters of solidarity from around the country, letters that were never delivered until recently.
Hampered by a terribly classical narrative structure that fails to bring the full emotional and political spectrum of the case to the fore, The Moelln Letters does however succeed in articulating the lingering trauma of its victims while underscoring the contradictions of the modern German condition.
The Moelln Letters revolves around Germany's contradictions with regard to race (inselfilm produktion)
The second was Marcin Wierzchowski’s Das Deutsche Volk, a chronicle of the 2020 Hanau shootings by a far-right extremist that resulted in the murder of nine people of non-German origins.
Shot in arresting black and white over a period of four years, the film follows the families of the victims and the survivors – five were wounded – as they grapple with bereavement, with their burning wounds and quixotic fight for justice.
Numerous facts surrounding the shooting were left to the families to uncover as the preliminary signs of sympathy from the authorities swiftly turned to indifference.
The Berlinale’s reputation as a free, inclusive space may well be behind it, tarnished for years to come
A subplot involving the families’ struggles to erect a monument for their deceased loved ones illustrate the debilitating bureaucracy of a government adamant on forgetting and moving on.
After the film’s premiere, the local authorities decided against granting the families’ the permission to erect the monument and waged an attack on the mother of one of the victims by accusing her of "using the memorial for political agitation".
Unlike in 2024, there were no overt speeches at the Berlinale’s closing ceremony in support of Palestine. Yet that didn’t stop the CDU from threatening to cut state funding from the festival.
Incumbent minister of culture, Claudia Roth, is expected to leave office, to be replaced by CDU’s Joe Chialo, one of the main architects of the antisemitism clause that withholds funding from critics of Israel.
The Berlinale’s reputation as a free, inclusive space may well be behind it, tarnished for years to come. Its future has never been in peril as it is now.
