Found Futures V: Voices from Exile

Sunday, September 22, 2024
15:00–17:30
Found Futures 5: Voices from Exile

Ibrahim Shaddad, Eiman Hussein, Talal Afifi, Erica Carter, Tamer El Said, Ismat Amiralai, Khalid Abdulwahed, Fazel Jamil Hashimi, Mohammad Fayaz Lutfi, Hasibullah Sediqi
Moderation: Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

An event in collaboration with “Goethe-Institut im Exil”

In the summer of 2023, the premises of the Sudanese Film and Television Archive were occupied by the Rapid Support Forces. The Sudanese Film Group left its private archive behind and went into exile in Cairo.
After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, three staff members of the Afghan Film Archive (located in the presidential palace) left the country and are now living in Berlin.
Filmmakers and archivists talk about lost archives and those that are scattered around the world or in exile, such as the personal archives of Sudanese director Hussein Shariffe and Syrian documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay.

Ibrahim Shaddad, born in Halfa, Sudan in 1945, studied at the German Academy of Film Art (Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst, DHF). He has written and directed many films and some plays. Practically all of his films and plays in Sudan were discontinued by producers or banned by governments. He is a founding member of the Sudanese Film Group and a member the editorial board of the magazine Cinema. He is also the author of the book Once Upon a Time, Cinema in Sudan, published by the SFG in 2017.

Eiman Hussein is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and writer/poet living in the UK. She is dedicated to honoring the expansive legacy of her father Hussein Shariffe (1934-2005) through a variety of curatorial projects. Since 2023, Eiman has been a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Film Studies at Kings College London, where she works closely with Erica Carter to archive Hussein Shariffe’s works, a transnational collaboration that involves Talal Afifi, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Tamer El-Said, and others.

Talal Afifi is a Sudanese curator, film producer, and cultural activist. He is the founder and director of Sudan Film Factory, a cultural, film training and production institution based in Khartoum. With a particular focus on Africa and the Arab-speaking region, he has been actively involved in the industry since 2010, working as a film curator and producer. In 2014, Afifi founded the Sudan Independent Film Festival (SIFF) and he is also known for his efforts to promote cultural policies in Sudan.

Erica Carter is Professor of German and Film at King’s College London. Her publications include the co-authored Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking (2022), Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (2010), Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004), and the BFI German Cinema Book (2nd ed. 2021). Her current research centers on colonial cinema and decolonial curatorial and archive practice in the Bahamas, Ghana, and Sudan.

Tamer El Said is a filmmaker, producer, and associate professor of practice in filmmaking at American University in Cairo. He lives between Cairo and Berlin. His filmography includes 17 titles and has received several international awards. His first feature film, In the Last Days of the City, premiered at the 2016 Berlinale Forum and won the Caligari Film Prize. El Said is co-founder and artistic director of the alternative film center Cimatheque in Cairo, a multifunctional space that offers space, training, and programs for independent filmmakers.

Ismat Amiralay was born in Damaskus in 1938 and came to Germany in 1960, where he studied graphic design in Mannheim under Wolf Magin and painting under Paul Berger-Berger and Hans Nagel at the Freien Akademien Mannheim. Today, he works as a graphic designer and painter and his work has been shown at countless exhibitions in Germany. His brother was the important documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay, who passed away in 2011. 

Khaled Abdulwahed worked as a photographer in Syria before he became interested in moving images. Exile, flight, distance, and memory are themes that appear repeatedly in his filmic works. He produced his experimental short films Bullet (2011), Tuj (2012), and Slot in Memory (2013) while still in Damascus and Beirut. As a result of the war in Syria, he had to leave the country and travelled to Germany where he has worked since 2015 with the Berlin-based production company pong film.

Fazel Jamil Hashimi was born in 1990 in the North Valley of Badakhshan, Afghanistan. He studied chemical engineering at Jawzjan State University and after years of working with rehabilitation projects, he was hired in 2018 as the general manager of the Afghan Film Archive in the archives of the presidential palace of Afghanistan (ARG Archive). He worked there until the fall of the republican system in August 2021. In the last six months of the republican regime, he also worked as the Acting Director of the ARG Archive in addition to his main responsibilities. After the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, he fled the country and entered Germany in October 2022. He is now a student at HTW-Berlin in the field of conservation and restoration of audiovisual cultural works and at the same time he is doing short-term internship at the German Federal Archives.

Mohammad Fayaz Lutfi was born in Kabul in 1989 and holds a diploma in computer science and management. He worked at the Afghan Film Archive from 2006 until 2018. With his colleagues, he successfully established a 35mm and 16mm archive and a film database, and worked on the digitization of motion pictures. When the Afghan Film Archive merged with the Presidential Archive in 2018 and was renamed ARG Archive, he continued working there as an employee in the document department. He will soon start an internship at the German Federal Archives focusing on the digitization of motion pictures.

Hasibullah Sediqi specializes in film restoration. His career began at Afghan Film and he later became the Senior Video Editor and Film Restoration Specialist at ARG Archive in the presidential palace, having digitized around 3,500 reels of 35mm and 16mm film. He is a documentary editor and award-winning photographer. He has received a one-year scholarship from Gerda Henkel Stiftung to further enhance his knowledge in film archiving and restoration at Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin.