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Emergency meeting called to discuss festival’s ‘future direction’ after series of controversiesThe organisation that manages the Berlin film festival is to meet for talks amid reports that its American director faces dismissal after a series of rows ov…
This portrait of a multi-ethnic comic troupe could do with more unpicking, but its reflections on the grind of war, life on the road and the reactive nature of comedy are insightfulIt must surely, sometimes, seem to everyone involved that the name shou…
Remembering and documentation are radical acts in Lebanon, a country with a tumultuous history and no national archive. Daher’s effervescent cultural collage is a direct challenge to collective amnesiaAt one point in Lana Daher’s film Do You Love Me, a…
Mehdi Mahmoudian released 17 days after arrest for signing a statement condemning Iran’s supreme leader and regime’s protest crackdownMehdi Mahmoudian, the Oscar-nominated cowriter of It Was Just an Accident, has been released from an Iranian prison 17…
At least 80 film-makers and stars sign open letter after German festival jury president Wim Wenders says they should keep out of politicsMore than 80 current and former participants of the Berlinale, including Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton and Adam McKa…
Hamdan Ballal says violence on West Bank as bad as ever, nearly a year after his Oscar-winning film shocked the world The co-director of the Oscar-winning No Other Land has said his home and family have come under renewed attack, almost a year after th…
Inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that gripped Iran in 2022, two film students created a documentary, Memories of a Window, about onlookers who anonymously record footage as proof of state violenceFootage that went viral from Iran in late 2…
Nine-year-old Lamia is obliged by her school to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein, and meets a series of vivid characters as she shops for sanctioned ingredientsThere’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi…
Robin Vanbiesen’s documentary uses the killing of Mawda Shawri in Belgium as the starting point to explore the dehumanising machinery of border policyHere is an insightful but perhaps over oblique Belgian documentary that sets itself an ambitious goal:…