From 3-10 April 2019 the 10th ALFILM – Arab Film Festival Berlin will be showing current feature films and documentaries from the Arab-speaking world. This time there will be a focus on Egypt: the opening film of the festival is the Egyptian YOMEDDINE by A.B. Shawky which ran in competition in last year‘s Cannes Festival, a charming outsider road movie. Beshay has lived in a leper colony since childhood. He‘s healed, but is deformed by scars. After the death of his wife he decides to go look for his family with his donkey cart. He notices too late that the orphan boy Obama has been hiding in his cart. Other highlights: the Gent Film Festival Best Film winner ZAGROS ( Sahim Omar Khalifa, Belgium 2017) about a Kurdish couple who flee to relatives in Brussels after the pregnant Havin is accused of adultery in her village. In Belgium, her husband Zagros is haunted by doubts and jealousy. LES BIENHEUREUX/THE BLESSED (Sofia Djama, France/Belgium 2017) is about intellectuals and youths that spend a night in Algiers in different ways after the Algerian Civil War in 2002. A portrait of a “generation that‘s caught between a thirst for freedom and a suspicion of everything that‘s western (meaning colonial)“ (Hollywood Reporter). In the essayist documentary ERASED, ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE (Ghassan Halwani, Lebanon 2018) the director is looking for a man who was kidnapped in Beirut 35 years ago and has since disappeared. 10 years ago his face appeared on the street again, but was it the same man? Halwani uncovers the darkest chapter in Lebanese history bit by bit. The animated film THE TOWER by Norwegian director Mats Grorud is about 11 year old Wardi who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. The film is the result of animation workshops which Grorud carried out in Bourj el-Barajneh.