FRED Film Radio - English Channel

The second feature film of Tunisian-born director Youssef Chebbi, Plague, is one one of the six feature films selected at the 14th edition of Final Cut in Venice, the program of  Venice Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge that supports film in post-production from all African countries and six countries of the Middle East (Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen).

Plague is a story about two twin brothers working in palm tree exploitation in Tunisia. The plot revolves around their daily lives, which take a turn when one brother encounters a palm tree-eating parasite.

Youssef Chebbi describes he parasite symbolizes broader issues, notably the introduction of foreign palm trees just before Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, which led to the spread of the parasite and threatened the country’s main economic resource in the south. Chebbi emphasizes how the film fictionalizes the potential spread of a plague, illustrating the profound impact this could have on Tunisian society and the environment.

The director talks about the deep connection he has to the south of Tunisia, where his family is from, and how his return to the country inspired the project. Youssef  Chebbi met the twin brothers in 2019 in the city of Tozer and was struck by their authenticity, which led him to cast non-professional actors for most roles. He highlights the importance of working closely with these farmers, ensuring the film remains authentic while balancing professional actors like Eya Bellagha, Mohamed Grayaa. Shooting took place in Tozer over a month and a half, with a focus on capturing real environments to maintain authenticity.

Plague is a co-production involving Tunisian, French, Qatari, and Saudi entities, among others. Chebbi shares that the production involved funds from Tunisia’s Ministry of Culture, Doha Film Institute, Red Sea, and regional France aid. The budget was tight, but the team managed to raise sufficient funds to complete filming, primarily focusing on exploring Tunisia’s imaginary landscapes rather than its reality. The postproduction is ongoing, with a screening scheduled soon, and sales are already being handled by a distributor in France. Chebbi emphasizes Tunisia’s strong technical infrastructure, although financial limitations remain a challenge. Plague’s editing process is in progress, with final touches being made ahead of its premiere.

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Madi Makambu is the second feature of congolese director and screenwriter Machérie Ekwa Bahango about the lives of the two lovers, Madi and Djino, who experienced a denied pregnancy.

It is one of the six feature films selected at the 14th edition of Final Cut in Venice, the program of  Venice Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge that supports film in post-production from all African countries and six countries of the Middle East (Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen).

After her successful debut Maquila, which won the Jury Prize at Berlinale in 2018, Machérie Ekwa Bahango shares her journey in developing her second feature film, Madi Makambu. She discusses the social themes explored in the film, set in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and highlights the challenges of filmmaking in her country. The director emphasizes the importance of perseverance and passion, especially considering the difficulties faced by local filmmakers due to the lack of a professional industry. Her insights into Madi Makambu reveal her deep engagement with social issues that resonate with her personal experiences and community.

The production journey of Madi Makambu was fueled by resourcefulness and international collaboration. Bahango recounts how she initially sought to fund the project independently before engaging co-producers from France and Belgium. She explains how partnerships with Canal Plus and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie facilitated the film’s development, despite limited funds. Bahango also shares her strategy of quick production to avoid prolonged delays, underscoring her determination to bring her vision to life. She notes the ongoing process of securing additional co-producers, distributors, and partners to complete post-production, with a focus on maintaining an all-African crew on set.”

Looking ahead, Machérie Ekwa Bahango describes her excitement about its selection for the final cut at Venice and her hopes for the film’s future. She expresses her eagerness to receive further support to finish the editing process and deliver the film in the best possible condition. Bahango also shares her pride in assembling an entirely African team, with most crew members from Congo and one Tunisian assistant director, emphasizing her commitment to developing local talent. The director remains optimistic about the impact of Madi Makambu and its potential to highlight social realities in Congo, reinforced by the recognition and visibility gained through the Venice International Film Festival.

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Rula Nasser, producer (with The Imaginarium Films) of the film Occupational Hazards by Bassel Ghandour, discusses this compelling Palestinian family dark comedy and drama. The film is one of the six feature films selected at the 14th edition of Final Cut in Venice 2026, the program of Venice Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge that supports film in post-production from all African countries and six countries of the Middle East (Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen).

The story of Occupational Hazards centers on a Palestinian family living in Jerusalem, navigating the complex realities of occupation with humor and irony. Bassel Ghandour aimed to depict how Palestinians creatively resist displacement and preserve their homes through dark comedy. The film offers a perspective on resilience amid restrictions, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in highlighting everyday struggles. The narrative draws on real stories collected over two years of research, portraying a family living in a house where underground tunnels and crack repairs symbolize the ongoing conflict. This approach combines authenticity with irony, making it a vital project today, especially in Arab and Palestinian contexts.

collective experience of Palestinians facing occupation laws. Bassel Ghandour’s research involved extensive fieldwork, including living in Jerusalem with a British passport and engaging with local youth and activists. The production involved a diverse crew, including Palestinian professionals and actors from the Palestinian diaspora, to ensure authenticity. The film’s casting includes professionals from Lebanon, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Palestinians living abroad, reflecting the community’s multifaceted identity. Shooting took place in Jordan to mirror Jerusalem’s environment, utilizing VFX to recreate Jerusalem’s cityscape and conflict zones

Occupational Hazards is a collaborative international production, co-financed by Arab funds and supported by partners in Qatar, Poland, and the UK. The post-production stage has just begun, with plans to finalize the film by early next year. The team is actively seeking distributors and international markets to showcase the project further.

This is Rula Nasser’s third time participating in the Final Cut program, which she values for its support in elevating the film’s quality and market reach. Past projects supported by final cut include Inshallah, a Boy by Amjad Al-Rasheed, which received recognition and awards. The team is optimistic about the film’s future, aiming to amplify Palestinian stories on the global stage.

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A Quarter to Thursday by Algerian screenwriter and director Sophia Djama, is one of the six feature films selected at the 14th edition of Final Cut in Venice 2026, the program of Venice Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge that supports film in post-production from all African countries and six countries of the Middle East (Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen).

Sophia Djama is a filmmaker whose work explores surrealist worlds and political themes. With A Quarter to Thursday, she aims to address issues of fascism, authoritarianism, and gender rights through a satirical lens, set against a backdrop of absurd situations. The discussion was held to shed light on her creative process, production journey, and the social commentary embedded in her film.

In the interview, Sophia Djama discusses the origins of her project and how it ties to her earlier short stories. Her initial short film, Limply on Saturday Morning centered on absurd and surreal adventures in Algiers. She decided to adapt one of her stories into a feature film, which led to the creation of A Quarter to Thursday. The film depicts a bizarre, timeless, and placeless world where characters face absurd situations amid rising fascist tendencies. Djama emphasizes that the film is a reflection of global political regression, not confined to a single country. She uses surrealism to explore themes of chaos, authoritarianism, and gender oppression, inspired by her concern for women’s rights and the resurgence of far-right movements in Europe and beyond.

Sophia Djama shares insights into the production challenges of her film, which involves France, Belgium, and Algeria. She found it difficult to secure funding due to the complex administrative and financial landscape. Her French co-producer, Jean Bréhat and Emma Binet, were crucial in bringing A Quarter to Thursday to life despite limited resources. The film’s financing also relied heavily on France’s CNC, which supported her project through substantial funding. She created her own Algerian company mainly to facilitate administrative procedures and to handle funding applications from Algerian and Arab funds. Djama describes her efforts to connect different national contexts into her project while maintaining her vision of surrealism and political critique.

The film includes animation by algerian painter Mehdi Bardi, adding a surreal layer to the storytelling. Music by Issam Krimi complements the film’s atmosphere of tension and repression, reflecting the outside world’s chaos versus the characters’ inner struggles. Sophia Djama hopes that her presence at Venice’s Final Cut will increase her project’s visibility, aiming to win awards and attract industry attention to her politically engaged cinema.

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Francesca Duca, producer (from Le Moindre Geste) of Eldorado, the taste of the South by Tunisian director and screenwriter Alaa Eddine Aljem. Eldorado, the taste of the South is one of the six feature films selected at the 14th edition of Final Cut in Venice 2026, the program of Venice Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge that supports film in post-production from all African countries and six countries of the Middle East (Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen).

Eldorado, the taste of the South explores the themes of migration and societal borders, blending humour and melancholy, which are hallmark elements of Alaa Eddine Aljem’s unique cinematic language. We discussed the film’s story, co-production challenges, and future steps for this compelling project.

The film Eldorado, the taste of the South is Alaa Eddine Aljem’s second feature, following his debut The Unknown Saint, premiered in Cannes Critics Week in 2019. Francesca Duca explains that the movie explores the universal quest for a better life, using a mix of humour and melancholy to depict a utopian island where Saharan African and Moroccan migrants believe they can find peace and prosperity. The narrative highlights how different groups react to this strange society, using cinema to mirror real capitalist struggles, and its focus on socio-economic themes through a poetic lens.

The production process for Eldorado, the taste of the South has been an odyssey, with financing and co-production challenges over the past six years. Francesca Duca shares that the project involved collaborations with Morocco, France, Italy, Norway, and other partners. She details how initial financing fell through when a French partner pulled out just before shooting, which delayed the process but ultimately led to strong new alliances. The film’s development required resilience, with support from multiple institutions like CNC, Morocco, the French Cinema du Monde, Norway, Red Sea Film Festival, reflecting the international nature of this project. The complex process underscores the importance of solid partnerships, a theme that resonates with the collaborative spirit of Eldorado, the taste of the South, highlighting cross-cultural storytelling and international cooperation.

Currently, the film is in post-production, having wrapped shooting in Marrakech and Italy. Francesca Duca describes the creative choices made, including building Eldorado, the taste of the South in Moroccan studios like Jacaranda and shooting additional scenes in Rome. The film’s visuals involve a mix of studio sets and physical locations, emphasizing the contrast between the utopian society and the real-world struggles of migrants. Francesca Duca emphasizes their confidence in the film’s potential, especially with the support of their sales agent, BFF, based in Belgium, and support from various cultural funds. The aim is to push Eldorado, the taste of the South through festivals and markets, with a focus on its timely commentary on migration and societal borders. The upcoming stages include final editing and festival submissions, with anticipation of future recognition in international markets.

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Tamara Mariam Dawit, producer from Gobez Media, and acclaimed Ethiopian director Abraham Gezahagne, are the creative team behind the film Mehal Sefari, which is one of the six feature films selected at the 14th edition of Final Cut in Venice 2026, the program of Venice Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge that supports film in post-production from all African countries and six countries of the Middle East (Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen).

Mehal Sefari is the first project from Ethiopia’s to make it into Final Cut in Venice: this emphasizes the importance of the program in opening doors for African cinema. The discussion also explores the film’s themes, production process, and international collaborations.

Tamara Mariam Dawit discusses how the film’s inclusion in Final Cut in Venice signifies a major milestone, opening new opportunities for Ethiopian filmmakers on the international stage. She emphasizes the importance of this project in elevating Ethiopian stories and facilitating international co-productions. The film itself, set during the Ethiopian Red Terror, offers a poignant look into a turbulent period in Ethiopian history, which remains largely underrepresented internationally. This makes Mehal Sefari not only a political statement but also a cultural bridge through which stories from Ethiopia and Africa at large can reach a broader audience.

amara Mariam Dawit explains the extensive international co-production behind Mehal Sefari, involving Ethiopia, Canada, Germany, Norway, and Saudi Arabia. She highlights the strategic role of these partnerships in securing financing and technical expertise, particularly in building production infrastructure within Ethiopia. She shares that most of the crew was Ethiopian, with targeted inclusion of international professionals to facilitate knowledge sharing and capacity building. The film was shot entirely in Addis Ababa, using a mix of local talent and foreign crew. This collaborative approach aims to develop local capacity while ensuring the film meets global standards, demonstrating the power of Mehal Sefari to serve as a model for future Ethiopian and African productions.

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Presented in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2026 and arriving in Italian theaters via MUBI from August 19, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the new film from Jane Schoenbrun, the American director behind We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun talks about making a film from the other side of transition, the joyful chaos of horror, and how a childhood spent making homemade slasher movies and writing fan fiction became the key to remaking shame into liberation.

Schoenbrun describes the new film as, in a way, the true start of a post-transition body of work. Both of her features were made after she came out to herself, but I Saw the TV Glow, shot about a year into hormone therapy, was written in the overwhelming immediate aftermath of telling everyone in her life that she was about to transition. “That was a movie about how overwhelming and insane getting to that place where you’re ready to become yourself is, but it knows better than to try to then explain what’s going to happen once you do become yourself.” When she wrote that film, she says, she wasn’t yet seeing the benefits of transition  “like when you get on a medication and all of the bad side effects come first.” This film comes from a different place. “This movie comes from a place of the good having kicked in. It’s a movie about the strange and beautiful and tender process of, for the first time in your life in your 30s, experiencing what most people do in their teen years: coming into a body, a sexuality, and an identity as an adult that feels right.”

Schoenbrun keeps rewriting a film all the way up to color correction. “I think it’s the only way to make a movie that feels present and joyful,” she says of a process that is at once meticulously planned and radically open. A show-stopping killing spree set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December” was written for her I Saw the TV Glow collaborators and mapped out over roughly a hundred hours of meetings. “Working with folks you’ve already built a language with lets you be like a ‘dungeon master’ going on an even crazier campaign.” Just as much of the film, though, had to be found in the moment, adapting to a location or an actor as they went. “When you make a live-action film, you are collaborating with reality, and that’s a gift.”

Long before film school, Schoenbrun was writing X-Files fanfiction at eight or nine years old. By middle school, armed with a cheap 90s camcorder, she was directing her friends in full slasher plots. “I literally made slasher movies,” she says of the tapes, though a suggestion that one could resurface as a bonus feature is firmly rejected. “I repeat: it will never be released.”

Schoenbrun thought often about Gillian Anderson while writing the film,  many of her lesbian friends, she says, describe Anderson as their “awakening” but nothing quite prepared her for actually meeting the actress who shaped her own X-Files-obsessed childhood. “In fourth grade, my most prized possession was an X-Files novelization,” she recalls. Getting on a Zoom call with Anderson decades later felt surreal. “It felt like meeting someone I knew from childhood. But she’s such a serious artist — she is not Dana Scully. She is a full, rich, and tender human being. Collaborating with her was an emotionally rich human experience.”

The film is also a love letter to watching slasher movies without overthinking them, something Schoenbrun traces back to growing up at the video store, where the horror section carried an illicit, almost sexual allure. “In fifth grade, my best friend and I rented every Nightmare on Elm Street movie,” she says. For her, horror has a festivity specific to the genre: “Getting candy, hooting and hollering at the most outrageous death possible. It’s very joyful.” That idea surfaces directly in the film, when young Billy watches people at a strength-testing machine and calls it a “strange mating ritual” Schoenbrun’s own way of describing why audiences keep remaking these movies, year after year.

The film pokes plenty of fun at pretension, including, Schoenbrun admits, her own pseudo-intellectual academic side. Her protagonist Chris even makes a movie called Vibrance, a retelling of Psycho from the shower curtain’s point of view. But underneath the joke, the intertwining of pleasure and death is the film’s real subject. “I read a lot of Bataille in conceiving the gaze on sex. We’re remaking this mating ritual from some originary desire or trauma.” Fear plays into that too: asked whether the fear of being wrong pushes her character Chris to repress herself, Schoenbrun points to a wider cultural sickness. “We’re all messed up sexually because sexual drives are there from the beginning, and we are formed by a world that is sick, misogynist, and filled with violence that we all carry within us. I think the movies are about creating a space to explore all of that that isn’t war. It’s pretend; if it gets too real, you can turn it off.” That drive to queer the genre’s fixed roles – “the killer, the victim, the final girl” — runs through the whole film, turning the slasher into a means of both desire and release.

Schoenbrun has long been aware of horror’s uglier undercurrents, from the genre’s overlap with exploitation films like I Spit on Your Grave to what she calls the lineage of the “trans monster” like Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Dressed to Kill, Sleepaway Camp, all directly referenced in the new film. “Growing up in the 90s, my primary association with transness was these monsters,” she says. Making a personal film about feeling good in her own body meant confronting that history head-on. “It felt obvious that if I was going to make a personal movie about feeling good in my body, that shame was the villain. It’s an internalized shame that came from culture. I used the history of gender deviance in slasher films toward my own ends of reaching liberation and letting out shame.” The film, she says, is a remake in more ways than one. “My movie is a remake because I am trying to quite literally remake myself and remake that iconography into something that doesn’t make me feel like s*** as a kid.”

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After winning Golden Leopard for Filmmakers of the Present in 2019 with his first feature , senegalese director Mamadou Dia  returns to the 79° Locarno Film Festival  2026 with he documentary “Atcha Atcha”, screened out of competition.

“Atcha Atcha” was also developed inside Final Cut in Venice 2025, where it won the prize offered by Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

“Achacha Atcha” is a phrase used in local languages like Wolof  to mean “let’s go”: it serves as a symbol for movement and change. The film is set inside the École des Sables in Senegal, and follows  dancers from various African countries as they undergo an intensive three-year training program under the guidance of legendary choreographer Germaine Acogny. 

The film explores themes of cultural preservation, identity, and the risk of losing important community spaces.

Mamadou Dia also discussed his long-term observational approach during filmmaking. He shared insights into the process of capturing the dancers’ development and the challenges faced during production, including funding and editing.  He  highlighted the collaboration with the french producer Eugénie Michel Villette (Les Films du Bilboquet) and the role of different production companies involved, as well as the support received from Venice’s Final Cut workshop inside the Venice Production Bridge.

Finally, Mamadou Dia talked about his future projects and the potential to support cinema development in Africa.

He mentioned his ongoing work on a fiction film  set in northern Senegal, which involves police investigation and local folklore.

Mamadou Dia expressed hope to create a cinema school in Senegal or join existing initiatives to nurture local talent, acknowledging the importance of festivals like Locarno and Venice in supporting African cinema infrastructure. He concluded by emphasizing the importance of sharing African films globally and fostering networks to ensure these stories reach wider audiences, all while reflecting on the ongoing environmental and cultural challenges facing his homeland.

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Belgian filmmaker Isabelle Tollenaere, already known and acclaimed at major festivals for her highly poetic hybrid documentaries exploring “the interplay between the rapid transformation of our physical world and the human experience of time and memory”, such as Battles (2015) and Victoria (2020), has just presented her first scripted feature film, a docufiction suggestively titled Paris Paris, in the Proxima Competition of the 60th Karlovy Vary Film Festival (July 3-11, 2026).

This work – another beautiful and deeply moving expression of her fascination with places and their constant transformation in resonance with the individuals inhabiting them, and with what traces they leave when one or the other disappears – is indeed reminding, well beyond its title, of the mix of melancholy and tenderness found in another film where the “Paris” opening the title was not in France, and also bears echoes of another one which could have been called “Paterson, Paterson” – and generally speaking of the body of work of both the cult filmmakers to whom we owe these masterpieces –, while the framing of its scenes and the bareness of its setup crowded with existentialism often evokes a slightly less defeated Samuel Beckett, as humour and human connection really shine through in Paris Paris (with no comma between the two city names).

As Tollenaere herself points out, in her first reality-based fiction work, the underlying themes of alienation, bottomless nostalgia for places which do not exist anymore, and suppressed longing, as only the present seems to count, are balanced by the friendship and warmth of the variegated community of displaced people we meet as they try to find their place in Paris, France – at the language class where the film starts, but especially between the naked walls (except for one adorned with wallpaper featuring the Eiffel Tower) of the abandoned flat where three most endearing characters Yi-En from China, Junior from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Hamzah from Palestine end up “finding a home with each other”.

On what sparked the making of this movie: “When I found out there was a replica of Paris that was built in China, I was immediately fascinated by this and I also quite immediately had the idea to make a film based on the doubling of the same city, without knowing what it could entail yet.”

“So I went to Tianducheng, which is where the replica of Paris was built, and I was really struck by this construction fever that I saw everywhere. Entire neighbourhoods were being demolished and there was construction happening everywhere, so there was a drastically rapid changing of the landscape occurring, and I also heard testimonies of people saying ‘when I leave home for a while and come back, I don’t recognise the place anymore. I can’t find my way home anymore,’ so this is when the themes of loss, disappearance, memory, and the precariousness of home first started erupting.”

“And then I thought that maybe I could combine this with filming a Chinese community or a Chinese person in Paris, France but then I felt like I did not want to focus too much on the concept of China, but more on the feeling of foreignness and alienation and on this idea of having to leave home behind and trying to find a new home in this new place, so I came up with a story of the three men coming from very different parts of the world, each carrying memories of other cities with them.”

On the incredibly precise and rich script, so elegantly carried by the thoughtful mise-en-scène and cinematography that it lets meaning emerge and texture build in the space between the lines: “As I was telling the Czech audience the other day, I actually wrote the first draft in the Czech Republic, where I came on a holiday, back in 2015, so I worked on it for a very long time.”

“[It represents] many years of finding things in reality and bringing them into the script, and then again throughout the process of the casting and the repetitions that we did, during which they [the non-professional actors, here playing slightly different versions of themselves] brought their personal stories and personal objects, and [in the case of Mahmoud], who actually writes poetry, the poem I included in the film, after he recited it for me, and all these things sort of came together.”

“Which was super fascinating, […] and I feel like it makes the script more alive and much more valid and true, and this is also what excites me in filmmaking: this exchange with the people I work with and what they bring to the film and how they help shape the film.”

About disappearing, with or without a trace: This recurring motif “speaks of the reality of their situation”, says Tollenaere, and she witnessed it first hand during her research on the ground.

“People sometimes just completely disappeared, and I don’t know what happened to them and it really touched me a lot, so I wanted to include this in the film. It is a very precarious situation, and although there is a lot of lightness in the film […], I also wanted to bring out this reality of their situation, and the hardship of the situation and the inhumanness of the situation.”

On finding the right balance between hardship and warmth: “I wanted to strike a balance between making a very political film and, on the other hand, [also having] a lightheartedness and a kind of humour in the film, and a playfulness – not to diminish this reality, au contraire, but actually to show these people’s resilience and their humanness.”

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After premiering his first feature (Namo, 2020) at the Berlinale, his second (The End, 2022) in Busan, and collecting the Audience Award in Venice with the third (The Witness, 2024), acclaimed Berlin-based Iranian filmmaker Nader Saeivar celebrated the premiere of Hijamat, his fourth feature as a director, Czech style, at the 60th Karlovy Vary Film Festival (July 3-11, 2026).

The narrative pace and style of this contender for the Crystal Globe, set in Berlin amongst a rather instantly claustrophobic Turkish community presenting a boisterous mosaic of stifling religion-related conundrums, clearly bears the signature which has earned Saeivar international recognition as a screenwriter and regular collaborator of Jafar Panahi, especially for the latter’s 3 Faces (2018), which garnered the Best Screenplay award in Cannes, and of course for his more recent It Was Just an Accident, winner of the 2025 Palme d’Or, which they also wrote together.

This immediately recognisable footprint certainly also has to do with the fact that Jafar Panahi produced Hijamat, and served as the film’s editor as well.

The whole progression of Hijamat hinges on the irreconcilable contradiction between the evident diversity (of generations, of relationships with traditions, of “ways of being a Muslim”, or of sexual identities) existing even within this tight-knit community and the monolithic rigidity of what is considered acceptable by the local imam, whose prescriptions everyone in the community constantly seeks, on each and every subject of daily life, anchoring the hold of this religious authority on the private sphere, which becomes inexistant, and obliterating the individual itself.

In the case of the main character, Murad (Kida Khodr Ramadan), who takes it upon himself to support his brother Kerem, exposed as gay, the notion of sin which the imam systematically dangles over every situation manifests in the form of his stifling sense of duty, which clearly appears as a deeply internalised corollary concept from which Murad cannot escape, having chosen to stay repressed.

On the apparent paradox of having a variegated community and one single inescapable guiding principle: “I was really lucky that my first destination, when I emigrated, was Berlin, a very cosmopolitan, multicultural city where you cannot say which culture is the dominant culture. Many Germans believe that they themselves are foreigners in their own city. When I arrived in Berlin, discovering this multicultural city changed my way of thinking and of seeing things.”

“Then I realised that everybody, of all generations and ethnicities etc., had, all of them, one problem, and that’s the mental walls they build around themselves. You can see it very often in Berlin, everywhere. These walls are made of different materials, but all of them are really tall. For muslim communities for example, these walls are made of religion or superstitions, but for the Westerners, these walls are made of rigid laws and regulations and they think nothing can be changed, nothing can transcend that. So I decided that if I was going to live in Berlin, the first thing I was going to do is attack these walls.”

On the meaning of the “hijamat” in the film: The title refers to a technique frequently practiced in many Muslim countries, which involves placing cups on someone’s back to pull the skin into traction, which results in a laceration of the skin with drawing of blood into the cup.

Saeivar explains that as Murad feels that the community, whilst also offering protection, is controlling his life, dictating all the rules, “in order to overcome these rules, he changes his blood, takes out the dirty blood, which is the symbol of wrong beliefs, or outdated beliefs.”

As the conversation then moves to the many interesting, key characters in the film, which includes the young, sleepwalking son (the first character to appear, in the very first shot), the screenwriter-director adds that “in many religious, if you don’t change these outdated and wrong beliefs, old beliefs, if you don’t remove that blood, these things can happen again to the next generations, repeat themselves, as you can see through the son.”

Amongst the many motifs running through the film are the function of stories, painting, the Kosovar Muslim wife of Murad, Leyla (Nicolette Krebitz), and also the strictly peripheral presence of Berlin and Germany around this community, with the exception of one recurring figure – a disturbed German elderly woman played by Nastassja Kinski.

“The reason why I chose Nastassja Kinski for the role of Margot, says Nader Saeivar, is that she represents the glorious past of Germany and German cinema, as well as modern Germany, the reality of today, which is that what was once working does not work anymore. [She is consumed] by her memories, by the fact that she lives in the past. This is exactly what religion does in the East. What religion does in the East, memories and the past are doing to the Westerners.”

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