CANCELLED last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year the Goethe Film Week (25 June-2 July) offers a selection of contemporary German and Arab films that include feature, documentary and experimental pieces in addition to restored classics. With only so many viewers allowed at screening, the Goethe Institute in Cairo is making the films available online for the duration of the programme through the Goethe on Demand streaming platform. The opening film is Berlin Alexanderplatz, directed by Burhan Qurbani. It is the story of Francis (Welket Bungué), a refugee from Guinea-Bissau whose attempts to become a good man in Berlin fail miserably. Francis lives in hostel with other immigrants, working as a construction worker for a racist supervisor. When he loses his job after a debacle involving his friend Ottu (Richard Fouofié Djimeli), he finds himself drawn to the drug dealer Reinhold (Albercht Schuch). The film was nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and won the Eurimages Award at Rotterdam International Film Festival as well as the Aluminum Horse and the Bronze Horse at the Stockholm Film Festival and the Film Award in Gold and Silver at the 2020 German Film Awards. The Film Week also features the Syrian film Qafas Al-Sokkar (Sugar Cage), directed by Zeina Al-Qahwaji, which over 60 minutes demonstrates the hard life the director's parents lead during the civil war. It won the Best Feature Documentary award at the recent 22nd Ismaila International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts (16-22 June). Visar Morina's Exil (Exile) tells the story Xhafer (Mišel Matičević), a chemical engineer from Kosovo in Germany who feels discriminated against and bullied at work. It all starts when Xhafer arrives at his home to find a dead rat strung to the gate. He begins to feel alienated as he is repeatedly left waiting in the wrong meeting room, purposely misled by his boss and referred to as Croatian instead of Kosovan. While his German wife Nora (Sandra Hüller) – a PhD student – thinks he is being paranoid, Xhafer's life begins to unravel. The film was nominated for the Golden Eye Award at the 2020 Zurich Film Festival and won the Cineuropa Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Newly restored versions of Waxworks (1924) by Paul Leni and M-a City Hunts a Murder (1931) by Fritz Lang were also screened. The Week featured a one-day workshop on restoration by Julia Wallmüller.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
