BODIES IN—BETWEEN: a virtual film program from Germany and the Arab region

A film program of 12 films featuring individual destinies of protagonists from Germany and the Arab region, inhabiting liminal spaces, in their quest for self-realization. Curated by Iskandar Abdallah, the films, in both geographical contexts, tackle themes of alienation; immigration; borders; family relationships and in-betweenness. Nevertheless, the program does not attempt to plot a comparison between the starkly different milieus. 

Curatorial note 

Since the beginning of the 20th century, cinema has been a main site for representing and negotiating alternative forms of love, non-normative practices, and identities. For the most part, films contributed to stereotyping and stigmatizing sexual difference, reflecting validating, but also shaping social conventions and political imaginaries of the “ideal” bodies and “proper” desires. In many other cases though, filmic representations operated against the grain of those conventions, questioning normative consensus, and envisioning new possibilities of embodiment, identification, showing affection and seeking intimacy. 

 If German cinema has, as early as 1919, addressed topics of non-normativity in Anders als die Anderen (Different from Others) by Richard Oswald, who co-wrote it with the famous physician and pioneer advocate for sexual rights Magnus Hirschfield,  in 1954 Arab cinema ventured featuring a transgender main character in Miss Hanafi by Fatin Abdelwahab, considered to be one of the earliest films tackling transgender identities across the globe.  

Focusing on recent productions while providing insights into few pioneering classics,  we aim in this film program at bringing German and Arab filmic representations of non-normative identities in conversation. The selection encompasses films of different genres and styles that pursue a similar set of questions: How queer desires and embodiments are negotiated in face of social pressure and patriarchal norms? How queer identities are claimed? But also, how queerness can take shape beyond identity; in forms of intimacy and affection that disturb–often in decoded or ambiguous modes–conventional scripts of love, nuclear family, conjugal relationships, and gender dichotomy.  

To juxtapose German and Arab experiences in one film program is not to plot comparisons for the sake of noting or obscuring difference in as much as it is an attempt to understand queerness as a common condition of in-betweenness and an experience of alienation. Protagonists of the selected films inhabit liminal spaces between homes and identities, re-claiming them as  battlefields to redefine the self, negotiate norms, and break off with binaries. In the selected films, queerness unfolds in moments of conflict with social expectations, with power relations or even with one's own beliefs. These moments create a sense of alienation urging the self to recognize its peculiarity, but also offering new possibilities to imagine ways of living that are more just and free; to envision the world anew.  Alienation and liminality as a condition of this state remain, nevertheless, bounded by culture, history and political context. The particularities in expressing sexual differences and narrating non-confirming stories are also evident in the selected films, highlighting the distinctiveness of queer experience in the respective German and Arab contexts. 

Note on film selection 

No Hard Feelings (2020) by Faraz Shariat explores queerness in relation to exile, portraying a romantic encounter fostered by a common quest for home and roots. Yet love and friendship seem to break in the moment of realization of how distant the lovers stand from each other. Salvation Army (2013) by Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa, and Neubau (2020) by Johannes Maria Schmit, both also tackle the questions of home and belonging. Taïa’s film - based on his own novel - juxtaposes the struggles of Abdellah in his Genevan exile as an adult with his life as a teenager in Tangier, where his sexual desires started to unfurl but also where he had to suffer from the consequences of rejection and repression. While Markus in Neubau (2020) is torn between his love to his demented grandmother that lives in the village and needs his care, and his dreams of moving to Berlin and purse a self-determined life there, before he encounters a young Vietnamese technician, who brings new challenges to his monotonic life. Similar tensions between a queer urban life and a queer life in the village is also captured in Country Noise (2018) by Lisa Miller. There we see Toni, who in contrast to Markus in Neubau, had to leave her cosmopolitan turbulent life in Berlin and go back to her small Bavarian hometown to handle some inheritance issues. Her feelings of alienation and discomfort exacerbate there, but luckily, she meets Rosa, with whom she sees her hometown with different eyes and goes through a crazy journey of self-discovery.  

In the selected films, friendship and love offer alternative horizons of  belonging and refuge from alienation. For Amina in Upon the Shadow (2017) home becomes where her friends are; all share with her the experience of alienation and rejection by family and society, while Nora’s love to Romy in Cocoon (2020) helps her to stand up for herself, to overcome her anxieties and see Berlin with new eyes.  

The film program also features two film classics; the Tunisian film Man of Ashes (1986), the first feature film of Nouri Bouzid and Westler: East of the Wall (1985) by Wieland Speck. In Bouzid’s film we follow the story of Hachimi, who is  trapped between troublesome memories haunting his sexuality and the fears from the future in a society that is ruled by masculinist conventions and the norms of family and marriage. Speck’s film takes us to the divided city of Berlin in the 80s, featuring a romantic love story unfolding between two men despite the wall threatening their destinies to draft apart.  

Lebanese cinema is in focus of this program through a selection of 4 short films providing insights into contemporary articulation of queerness there, but also on how queer love is entangled with the political struggles in region as demonstrated in Roy Dib’s film Mondial 2010.  

We wish you a pleasant time watching our program!