EUME Discussion
Thu 23 Feb 2017 | 19:00–21:00

My name is not Ali – Ali im Paradies – Jannat Ali

Film screening (a film by Viola Shafik, Germany 2011) and discussion with Viola Shafik, Renate Leiffer and Irit Neidhardt

Werkstatt der Kulturen, Wissmannstraße 32, 12049 Berlin

Documentary by Viola Shafik, Germany 2011, 89 min, Arabic/French with Engl. ST

Discussants: Viola Shafik, Renate Leiffer, Irit Neidhardt

Synopsis:
Fassbinder’s ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF (1974) was ahead of its time in highlighting xenophobia in the Federal Republic of Germany. Fassbinder’s partner at the time, Mohamed El Hedi Ben Salem, played the role of the migrant worker, Ali. Travelling between Germany, France and Morocco, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history. (Text: Sylvia Bauer)

Viola Shafik is a researcher at the Art History department at Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. 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 curated numerous film series, 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).

Renate Leiffer, born in Munich, began working in film in the mid-1960s as translater, script girl, assistand director and free lancer at Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The cooperation with Rainer Werner Fassbinder began 1970 as script-girl, production assistant, head of distribution and finally as long year assistant director, starting with "8 hours are not a day" in 1972. Among further directors she worked with are René Clement, Pierre Granier-Deferre and Rainer Wolffhardt as well as especially Norbert Kückelmann.

Irit Neidhardt is running mec film, a distribution company for films by Arab directors. She is coproducer of several Arab documentary films, she curates film series on Arab subjects and is author of various texts on cinema and the Middle East.

The film screening and discussion are part of the Arabic film series “Beyond Spring”, organized by Mayadin Al-Tahrir e.V., EUME and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.

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