Around the 17th edition of ALFILM Arab Film Festival Berlin, a group of film enthusiasts came together for a two-day workshop titled Rewriting The Self – Cinema as a Laboratory of Becoming, organized in partnership with NAAS.

Guided by mentors Hosam Fahmy, Iskandar Abdalla and Abdalrahman Alqalaq through tools for reading film and exercises in creative critical writing, participants moved from analyzing what was on screen to asking what it opened up in them. Dossier 6 is the final output of the workshop, gathering five personal essays, each one a different route back to the self through films watched during the festival.

In a foreword, the three mentors, who also edited the dossier, briefly introduce each of the texts and ground them in the larger workshop context.

After watching Laila Abbas's Thank You for Banking with Us, Hiba Obaid opens with the question: "Is this Palestine?" writing against the idea of Palestine as an abstract political symbol, and toward one inhabited by ordinary family stories, dialects, and small questions, reclaiming an ordinariness that grand narratives of occupation and loss have often crowded out of Palestinian cinema.

Dalia Alfaghal begins from a misunderstanding. In "The Right Seat," a real-life dispute over a cinema seat during the festival's opening film, Palestine 36 by Annemarie Jacir, becomes her way into the film itself, and into the conditions under which cultural workers in Germany are allowed, or not allowed, to speak about Palestine.

Language itself became a subject of the workshop: standard or colloquial, essay or fragment. Amer Wardah answers in verse. "Who Ate the Wheat" moves in images rather than paragraphs, tracing an invisible thread between 1936 and 2026, and the sound of a plane that has never quite stopped ringing in his ears.

A seat returns in Dina Elzeneiny's "Notes in the Dark," where small physical discomforts, an elbow taking up too much space on a shared armrest, open onto larger questions of identity. She reflects on the documentary film Flana by Zahraa Ghandour, writing about the space women are allowed in public across the Arab world, her own space as a migrant in Germany, and the space two foreign languages have come to occupy in a mind still searching for its first language.

Finally, in "What If Scent Is the Last Road to Love?" Safi watches Mohamed Siam's My Father's Scent and follows the relationship between image and memory past the edge of what can be seen. He writes about how a scene can become a scent, and a scent a language, one that calls back first homes and returns to small personal wars we thought we had left behind.

Read the full dossier, in Arabic, on Malaffat.