Berlin’s Arab Film Festival highlights Palestinian voices

“Talking about Palestine in Germany should not be an act of courage,” the 2023 opening ceremony of ALFILM – Arab Film Festival Berlin organizers declared.

It is even more difficult to organize a film festival including Palestinian perspectives a year later, given the continuous horrors committed by Israel in Gaza. Right now, it seems like an insurmountable endeavor. It doesn’t even seem like a brave deed. In a way, it feels like a suicide,” festival director Pascale Fakhry remarks. Still, the team is taking this chance. From April 24–30, the festival ALFILM, which Fakhry describes as the “biggest cinema platform representing Arab culture in Germany” since its inception in 2009, will take place once more.

“Everyone is really tense,” Fakhry said to DW. This stressful environment has been exacerbated by several instances. For instance, Fakhry claims that prior to the program being displayed at the theater, police enquired about the event at the City Kino Wedding, one of the festival’s locations. According to Fakhry, the authorities hinted that there must be something sinister about an event they were unaware of, as they had heard that an Arab film festival was being hosted there.

The police “were extremely embarrassed,” according to the film festival organizer, when they learned that the full program could be obtained online, that the festival is being conducted for the last 15 years, and that the director of the theater was one of five locations in Berlin that were also participating in the event.

Arabic filmmakers are afraid to visit Germany

Numerous foreign news sources, such as the New York Times, have been covering the impact on Germany’s cultural sector regarding the cancellation and postponement of events where participants expressed support for Palestinians or made remarks about the Israel-Palestine conflict that were considered antisemitic.

The increased level of vigilance is partly influenced by the growing number of antisemitic acts in Germany. German politicians have been urged to respond to this situation and to take a strong stance against antisemitism, particularly in light of the nation’s historical accountability for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust.

German lawmakers were outraged in February by several prize-winning filmmakers’ acceptance remarks at the Berlin International Film Festival. As a result of media coverage characterizing his speech as “antisemitic,” one of the prize winners—an Israeli activist and director—said he received death threats in his native country.

Fakhry notes that many of the attendees of her event “are afraid to come to Germany… in such a context.” None of them, after all, wants to face criticism and be called antisemitic.”

‘Trigger words’ in Germany

The foreign filmmakers that the organizers of the ALFILM festival have invited have participated in preliminary briefings where they have talked about some of the special “trigger words in Germany,” according to Fakhry. “But we also told them that it is still a space that is free and that we will not censor them.” When used to characterize Israel’s practices, controversial terminology like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “settler colonialism” have sparked outrage in Germany. The German Ministry of the Interior has declared the phrase “From the River to the Sea” illegal.

This year’s festival spotlight segment is called “Here is Elsewhere: Palestine in Arab Cinema and Beyond.” The topic of the spotlight section is annually chosen in response to current problems. According to Fakhry, the programmers’ financial supporters remained confident in the team since they were open and honest about their choice of topic. They were at least able to “feel secure” because of this.

‘Each Palestinian story is political’

French-Palestinian-Algerian director Lina Soualem, who was invited to inaugurate the film festival with her documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, stated that she is not particularly more anxious to screen her work in Berlin than she is in other cities. She said to the outlet, “I mean, it’s always hard to speak about this in general.” Her documentary, however, is based on the true narrative of her family, so she is aware that these “life experiences are real and deserve to exist.”

The focus of Bye Bye Tiberias is four generations of powerful Palestinian women. Through a blend of home movies, archive footage, photos, and family reunions, the film reveals that Soualem’s great-grandmother raised her eight children by herself after the family was forced to flee their Tiberias home in 1948 during the war that ensued after the state of Israel was established. During what the Palestinians describe to as the “Nakba” (which means “catastrophe” in Arabic), hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted and stripped of their property.

Soualem’s mother, the well-known Palestinian performer Hiam Abbass (who featured in Succession), is another important character in the documentary. Abbas left her hometown of Deir Hanna to pursue her acting career in Europe. This exile has had an impact on the young filmmaker’s identity because she was raised in France and always had a need to learn more about her heritage.

As Soualem notes, “each Palestinian story is political per se,” since they “continued to not only survive, but to live after having experienced mass dispossession and deprivation of their identity as Palestinians — which is the case of every Palestinian, specifically since 1948.” Examining intimate relationships within the framework of a Palestinian family, accordingly, automatically conveys the collective history of the people.

On the vital role of telling the stories of the marginalised

Her film was finished before October 7, having shown at the Venice Film Festival in September of last year and being chosen as the Palestinian submission for the 2024 Oscars. However, dehumanization, identity loss, and silence of Palestinians already existed when Soualem filmed her film. The filmmaker claims that “all of these things were already a reality.” “We frequently discuss Palestinians as a group, treating them as an intangible people. Gaza is discussed as an abstraction. In reality, it’s people and lives.”

She claims that the dehumanization and stigmatization of Palestinians inspired her to create the movie, which aims to restore complexity to Palestinians and their lives via her own personal narrative.

The purpose of the Arab Film Festival is reflected in Soualem’s documentary: “Images and storytelling become vital in a context of invisibilized and marginalized stories.” The documentary filmmaker notes that history is written without us if we don’t communicate our tales. “Telling our tales and passing them on is another means of living. Cinema will always exist to commemorate these individuals, these lives that are being erased, especially in a setting when lives are disappearing.”