Viola Shafik

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history.

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history.

What if you witness a revolution but things get worse? What if your homeland is in ruins with no signs of reconstruction? How do you cope? You can either get angry, sick, and depressed or just escape into memories of a golden but lost past. Four people, two revolutions, and the story of a destroyed Egyptian city.

What if you witness a revolution but things get worse? What if your homeland is in ruins with no signs of reconstruction? How do you cope? You can either get angry, sick, and depressed or just escape into memories of a golden but lost past. Four people, two revolutions, and the story of a destroyed Egyptian city.

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history.

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history.

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history.

The film is set during the annual fasting dedicated to the Virgin Mary. While depicting the habits and customs related to this fasting in her familiar surrounding, the director asks her female Coptic relatives to tell their stories. Mothers, sisters, daughters and nieces out of four generations give an account which illuminates the changes which occurred in Egyptian society regarding education and emancipation and the role religion is assigned to in that context. The women's traditional religiosity that formed rather a subtext of their daily life starts to become institutionalized to the extent that life of the younger women became entirely centered on the church and its multiple activities. The film touches on the one hand on the rich mythological Coptic heritages which are rooted among others in Old Egyptian customs and beliefs and tackles on the other gender inequalities perpetuated by the Coptic church and backed by Egyptian society in general.