Cinemas in Wedding

Treat Me Like Your Mother(2025)

Documentary

Four trans women from Lebanon—Em Abed, Jamal Abdo, Antonella, and Mama Jad—recount lives shaped by resilience, love, and loss. Their stories span from the groundbreaking state-funded gender-affirming surgery of 1997 to the disappearance of Beirut’s once-safe queer spaces. Through personal photographs, archival footage, and recollections of places like the Raouche strip, their voices resurrect a forgotten history of community and survival amid war and oppression. Interwoven with the filmmaker’s own journey of self-discovery, this intimate documentary traces four decades of trans life in Beirut, celebrating friendship, identity, and the enduring spirit of chosen family.

She(2025)

Documentary

A choral narrative about female workers in one of the largest electronic industrial plants based in Vietnam.

My Father's Shadow(2025)

Drama

Two young brothers explore Lagos with their estranged father during the 1993 Nigerian election crisis, witnessing both the city's magnitude and their father's daily struggles as political unrest threatens their journey home.

On Our Own(2026)

Drama

Growing up without her parents, who had gone to work in the West, Flavia became a tough but distant teenager. The routine that keeps her safe and emotionally isolated is disrupted when two young children who have run away from home seek shelter with her.

The Stranger(2021)

Drama

In a small village in the occupied Golan Heights, the life of a desperate unlicensed doctor, who is going through an existential crisis, takes another unlucky turn when he encounters a man wounded in the war in Syria. Overturning all community expectations in times of war and national crisis, he ventures forth to meet his newly found destiny.

aKasha(2018)

Comedy, Romance

A Kasha is a universal offbeat love story set in a time of civil war - but the war is in Sudan and it is happening right now. We follow Adnan, an AK47-loving rebel, his long-suffering love interest, Lina, and the armydodging Absi, over a fateful 24 hours in a rebel-held area of Sudan.

Adieu Bonaparte(1985)

Drama, History, War

This big-budget historical epic from acclaimed Egyptian director Youssef Chahine features a crazed turn by Patrice Chereau as Napoleon Bonaparte. The film, an Egyptian-French co-production, deals with Napoleon's occupation of Alexandria and its effect on a typical Egyptian family. Michel Piccoli leads the cast as a general in Napoleon's army who tentatively befriends a local poet and falls in love with two young Egyptian brothers, reflecting complex themes of colonial desire, affection, and personal connection.

Between the Temples(2024)

Comedy, Drama

A grief-stricken cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. The two forlorn souls develop a special connection.

Behind the Palm Trees(2025)

Drama, Romance

Mehdi leads an exemplary life with his family and Selma, his new girlfriend in Marrakech. For the young couple, things are going smoothly until Mehdi meets Marie, a young French woman caught up in the social life of the expatriate community.

Tajouj(1977)

Drama, History, Romance

Beginning of the 20th century in the east of Sudan. Tajouj is the beautiful cousin of a young tribesman who falls in love with her and proclaims his love out loud in a song. However, the traditions of his tribe forbid such love, and his uncle refuses his request to marry Tajouj. But after the young man leaves the village and declares his remorse, the marriage is finally allowed after all. In the meantime, however, another man has expressed interest in Tajouj. A story full of jealousy ensues, which ends in tragedy.

Roqia(2025)

Horror

Two parallel stories. In the present day, the disciple of an old Raqi (a Muslim exorcist) fears that his master’s dementia will unleash evil. In 1992, after a car accident that left him with amnesia, Ahmed returns to his village, where nothing seems familiar to him: neither his wife nor his children. His youngest son, frightened by Ahmed’s bandaged face, is deeply afraid of him.

2nd Shorts Spotlight Sudan

Short-film Programme

A selection of films that look closely at how history leaves its mark on the body, on memory, and on the fragile balance that sustains everyday life. From prison cells to displacement camps, and from interior monologues and private dialogues to broken childhoods and lives steeped in estrangement, these works deliberately avoid any cold or detached register, instead drawing nearer to human experience in its most vulnerable and most intense forms. These are films about labor, fear, and loss, and about those small, stubborn impulses and gestures we invent in order to keep living. ( AlFilm )

Competition: Short Films IV

Short-film Programme

Gorgone

GORGONE is Jenny Teng's exploration of her family's trajectory through California, France, and Cambodia. Tracing her personal family history, the film reconstructs a collective narrative that tells the stories of genocide survivors and the generation after. It is a journey that engages with silence and sorrow, generational trauma, and the "in-betweenness" of diaspora identity. ( Sinema Transtopia )

Shorts Program – Of Love and Home

Short-film Programme

Al-buka’ `ala al-atlal (weeping over the ruins) is a tradition in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry in which the poet mourns and longs for lost love and home. This beautiful collection of shorts stands on this tradition in painting with the colors of melancholia, grieving past lives to make room for the inevitable wheel of history. ( AlFilm )

Wettbewerb Mittellanger Film 6