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by being posited as films that inform, educate and explain what is going on here to audiences over there, these films become central to a pre-existing East-West dynamic—a sphere of knowledge production and image-making that tries to translate the orient to an elsewhere

These are discourses that seek to “save brown women from brown men” or brown liberal men from oppressive brown regimes, or basically to save the Arabs from their Arabness, with all the cultural stereotypes such a term entails.

The problem with these films is that they ignore the interconnectedness of “developed” and “developing” countries, of authoritarianism in the Middle East and liberal democracies in the west, of Islamic fundamentalism and the Cold War, and of metropolitan centers of global capitalism and the dispossession of millions all over the world. The problem gets even more complicated when entitlement and ability to represent becomes unquestioned.

These films portray living stereotypes of actual people, focusing on the elements of their lives that are ‘interesting’ only in so much as they tell us something about clichéd versions of Egypt, Tahrir, Islam, women, art and war, conflict, poverty, dispossession and resistance. These topics are not interesting for those who live in war, conflict, poverty and dispossession, those for whom Tahrir was not a spectacle and resistance is a complicated act. In such a context these issues might be relevant, but they are only interesting somewhere else.

I am skeptical of the act of representation itself, the provision of ready-made, easily translatable narratives about 2011 as if the revolution was a thing, and as if "Arabness" is also a thing. If postmodernism declared the death of the meta-narratives—teleogically oriented, totalizing worldviews that tend to put in a claim for the universal and promise utopian resolutions that are yet to occur—Arab Spring documentaries lie on the opposite side of the spectrum. The conditions of their existence, profitability, visibility and circulation depends first and foremost on their claims to a certain truth about “what really happened” over there. But neither the "Arab Spring" nor the "Arab World" can be explained through the sum of their parts. They are constructed, time and time again, through the very narratives that eclipse alternative imaginaries, historical renditions or analyses by foreclosing the realm of imagination all together.

the biggest discovery of this year’s edition from the Middle East could very well be Sudan, the new Arab cinema on the block making its major international festival debut with two documentaries by first-time filmmakers: Marwa Zein’s Forum contender, Khartoum Offside; and Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Panorama pick, Talking About Trees.

Iran has had a modest presence during the recent past at Berlin – and this year is no different, with only a single feature representing the once powerhouse cinema across all sections. Deviating from the country’s signature social realism, newcomer Suzan Iravanian is attracting buzz for her Forum curio, Leakage, a supernatural mystery about a fifty-something middle-class woman who starts leaking oil from her body after her husband disappears.

Mostafa Derkaoui’s forgotten 1974 classic, About Some Meaningless Event, a docudrama about a group of filmmakers asking passersby in Casablanca about their expectations for Moroccan cinema, only to shift their focus to a resentful worker who accidentally kills his superior.  An investigation of the role of cinema and art in society, this militant effort - which was primarily funded by the sale of paintings of a number of contemporary painters – was banned in Morocco and virtually disappeared, until a negative print was discovered in the Spanish film archive, Filmoteca de Catalunya, in 2016 and subsequently restored.

The history of cinema in Gaza dates back to the 1940s, noted Khalil al-Mozayen, who directed a documentary called 36mm about the decline of cinema in Gaza.  "After 1948, war and refugees came to Gaza," Mozayen told Al Jazeera. "UNRWA [the UN's Palestinian refugee agency] began showing Arabic cinema in the refugee camps. Before the film, they'd broadcast messages telling people to drink milk and clean their teeth. The project enjoyed a lot of popularity." In the 1950s, Mozayen said, businessmen started to open cinemas. But after 1967, "religious groups started broadcasting messages against cinema", he said.

Al-Nasser Cinema was closed after the 1967 war, only to be reopened a year later upon the request of the new occupying authorities, the Israelis.

"At that time, we could no longer bring films from Egypt; we brought films from Israel. The cinema started showing Chinese, Indian, and European films," Khazendar said. "It was then that people began to stop going to the cinema. It became associated with the 'bad people'."

Gaza has produced notable film directors, such as Rashid Masharawi and the Nasser brothers, known as Arab and Tarzan, who have pursued their careers outside of Gaza