Beyond Spring - Arab Film Series
Thursday 16.05.2019 7:30 PM | Saal
Admission: €5
Organizer: Werkstatt der Kulturen/ EUME (Europe in the Middle East - The Middle East in Europe) / Mayadin al-Tahrir e.V.
Curation: Viola Shafik
Co-Operation
Independent Egyptian Cinema
Poisonous Roses
by Ahmed Fawzi Saleh
fiction, Egypt, 2018, 90 min, Engl. ST
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Saqr wants to flee from the grubby Egyptian tanners’ district where he lives and works. His older sister Taheya wants to prevent this at all costs. She sabotages the blossoming romance between her brother and a medical student and also tries to thwart Saqr’s future plans as a boat refugee in Italy. Among the dried skins and punch-drunk mules, a shaman silently watches from his improvised throne. He is to help Taheya with an occult solution in this intriguing, skittish portrait of poverty in today’s Egypt. With phenomenal shots of the towering scaffolding of a glue factory, juxtaposed with moving scenes in which the everlasting love between brothers and sisters prevails.
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Moderation
Iskandar Abdalla (Freie Universität Berlin) is a PhD student at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies working on: „Rendering Islam Liberal. Secularism, Sexulaity and Politics of Muslim Self-appropriation in Contemporary Germany.“ In his MA thesis in Islamic Sciences he dealt with the representation of Jews in Egyptian cinema. Abdalla was trained among others at the Deutsche Welle, works as a guide at Jewish Museum Berlin and as film curator for the alfilm-Festival Berlin.
Guest
Dina Wahba graduated from the faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. She is a Chevening scholar completed her Master’s Degree (M.A.) in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her recently published thesis topic is “Gendering the Egyptian Revolution”. Dina is currently pursuing her PhD in Free University, Berlin in “Politics, Emotion and Affect within the dynamics of Tahrir square”. Dina is a women’s rights activist who worked with several local, regional and international organizations such as International Rescue Committee (IRC), UN Women, the League of Arab States and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). She worked on a number of gender issues such as sexual and gender based violence, leadership, political participation and empowerment. Dina worked in several countries among them United Kingdom, South Sudan, Egypt and most recently Germany.
Beyond Spring - Arab Film Series
In 2010, the Tunisian protest movement triggered a wave of upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa that became known as “the Arab Spring”. However, there is also a history to tell beyond “Spring”.
Since 2014, the WERKSTATT DER KULTUREN has been highlighting films from several Arab countries as part of the Arab Film Series, with this specific selection of films curated by Viola Shafik.
It aims at exploring some major social and political issues in the region and further our understanding of various dynamics in regards to class, gender and politics in general, as well as explore topics concerning confessionalism, social justice and the question of Palestine.
The screenings will be accompanied by moderated panels with academic experts from the Berlin-based research program Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin.
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THE CURATOR
Viola Shafik, PhD is a filmmaker, curator and film scholar. She has authored among others Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, AUC-Press, Cairo, 1998 and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation, AUC-Press, 2007. She has lectured at the American University in Cairo and Zürich University and is in the selection committee of the Rawi Screenwriters Lab and the Berlinale World Cinema Fund. She has directed several documentaries, most notably Ali im Paradies/My Name is not Ali (2011) and Arij - Scent of Revolution (2014). She currently teaches at Humboldt University Berlin, as well as at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.
An event in cooperation with Mayadin al Tahrir e.V. and EUME (Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe).
The facilities of the WERKSTATT DER KULTUREN are accessible to wheelchair users.
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