EXBERLINER Issue 168, February 2018

FILM 2018
DE-PROGRAMMING THE STEREOTYPES
As programmer for Alfilm, Claudia
Jubeh provides Berliners with both
quality Middle Eastern cinema and
new perspectives on the Arab world.
Prior to the 2009 founding of Alfilm, the incredible
diversity of Arab cinema was all but inaccessible to
Berliners. “Any screenings here have largely focused
on ‘hot’ topics – women, religion and war – and
not on the films as works of art,” says Jubeh, Alfilm’s
38-year-old head of programming. Born in Germany with
a Palestinian father, having written her master’s thesis
on identity in Palestinian cinema and gone on to produce
Arabic-language films like 2016’s Dry Hot Summers, she
was aware of the need to broaden Berlin’s perspectives.
Together with co-founders Issam Haddad and Fadi Abdelnour,
she began a film festival that would showcase the
Arab world’s full cinematic output.
Considering the multitude of festivals in Berlin
founded and curated by men, it is striking that there is
such gender parity at Alfilm, both in the films it screens
and behind the scenes (the international team is femaleheavy).
Against expectations, there is no shortage of
films by female filmmakers in the Arab world, and Jubeh
ensures that they make up half the programme.
The festival screens around 18 feature-length films, three
short film programmes and a side programme which alternates
between spotlights and retrospectives. For its ninth
edition, to be held this April at Arsenal, FSK, Wolf and City
Kino, the team received a record number of over 600 entries.
The 2018 side programme will spotlight Arab masculinities,
an interesting choice in the post-#MeToo era. Jubeh
explains the decision. “During the refugee crisis, there
was a lot of talk about ‘the Arab man’ like it’s some sort of
concept, or a strange entity.” She hopes the programme will
counter the discourse in Germany that
directs attention to what she
calls “abject parts of Arab
identity.” — Madeleine Speed
“SCREENINGS OF
ARAB FILMS HERE
HAVE FOCUSED LARGELY ON
‘HOT TOPICS’, NOT ON THE
FILMS AS WORKS OF ART.”
Karolina Spolniewski
THE WOLF OF WESERSTRASSE
How Kino entrepreneur Verena von Stackelberg’s
ambitions took her from Soho to Neukölln.
For Von Stackelberg, founder and co-manager of Neukölln’s Wolf Kino,
a simple movie theatre was never going to suffice. “If you are crazy
enough to start a cinema in this day and age, you always have to think
of the ‘add-on’. Whether it’s a space for exhibitions or discussions, or if
it’s a café... you cannot survive just by showing films.”
This is a mantra that the 40-year-old Wolf founder lives by. Originally
a humble DIY haven with bare-brick walls and beer-crate seating, the
cinema has since been transformed into a slick two-screen complex
adjoined by a café/bar/co-working area. The local Neukölln creative set
devours both the Japanese fusion menu and Wolf’s programme of indie
crowd-pleasers (The Disaster Artist; The Shape of Water) interspersed with
premieres, seminars and festival screenings (American indie fest Unknown
Pleasures used the location this year).
The Heidelberg-born Von Stackelberg began her foray into cinema as an
usherette at arthouse cinema Curzon Soho while studying in London; she
went on to head their public events team before returning to Germany and
scoring a job as advisor for the Berlinale’s selection committee. She also
began curating the film programme at Berlin’s Soho House, which she still
does today. Tired of subpar entries and the Berlinale’s constraints (“If you
try to please everybody you end up with a kind of porridge”), she set her
sights on opening her own cinema in 2011.
Turning the brothel opposite her apartment into the Kino of her dreams
was hard – and sometimes lonely – work. “I often felt belittled as a young
woman trying to raise €500,000 for a project. I was very quickly surrounded
by older, richer, know-it-all men. It took me some time to balance that out.”
But Von Stackelberg took strength from her team, especially her best friend,
Polish filmmaker and Wolf co-founder Macin Malaszczak. Five years of
planning, construction and fundraising later (including a successful €55,000
crowd-funding campaign, several loans and help from Berlin-Brandenburg’s
Medienboard, which paid for one of their 2K digital cinema projectors),
Wolf officially opened in February 2017.
Von Stackelberg says of her team’s programming approach that “When
we take a film, we take it by the hand.” This means imaginative marketing
campaigns, high-profile guests (like A Ghost Story director David Lowrey,
who dropped in via Skype last month) and giving underplayed movies longer
runs and more favourable time slots. It’s apparently paid off: Wolf had
some of the best audience figures nationwide for Raoul Peck’s I Am Not
Your Negro during its release. “We gave it the 8pm slot and kept showing it,
even when Arte screened it on TV and other cinemas had stopped.”
One door down is Wolf Studio, a side-space for post-production, workshops
and Q&As. The editing
suite and virtual reality equipment
on site have attracted
the likes of hyped American
filmmaker Josephine Decker
(Madeline’s Madeline, see page
21). Von Stackelberg also uses
the studio to run classes for
teens from a Neukölln high
school, where they can learn to
act, programme mini-festivals
and make short films. “I want
to have a hub for filmmakers
and film lovers of all ages, to
create a better understanding
of filmmaking within the audience,”
Von Stackelberg says. In
many ways, she has achieved her
dream. — Thomas Wintle
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EXBERLINER 168