Berlinale 2026: Arab and Turkish filmmakers deliver strong line-up despite Gaza controversy

After a week of “will they, won’t they” speculation, as this writer had anticipated, Tricia Tuttle, the artistic director of the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), has not been removed from her post, despite hints to the contrary from right-wing German tabloids. 

Several letters of support have since been signed by Berlinale staff, as well as filmmakers and programmers from around the world. 

“Supporting genuine freedom of expression, including the freedom to articulate imperfect or unpopular opinions, has never been more important,” one open letter reads 

The German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported that Tricia Tuttle will remain in her position “after agreeing to plans for an advisory council and a code of conduct”, according to Wolfram Weimer, chair of the festival’s supervisory committee, Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin (KBB). 

Tuttle later emphasised that “the recommendations from the KBB Supervisory Board are in fact recommendations and not conditions of my employment”.   

What this particular code of conduct entails, how it should be applied, and to whom it applies remain anyone’s guess. The same uncertainty surrounds the role of the proposed advisory council.

One thing is clear, however: an impassioned pro-Palestine speech along the lines of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s fiery closing-ceremony address will likely not be tolerated, though how speeches of this kind could be controlled or moderated remains a mystery.

Amid the struggle to keep her position, Tuttle has yet to defend Khatib’s right to speak his mind, nor did she stand by the selection of his film, Chronicles from the Siege.

With accusations of antisemitism from the German press and right-wing commentators still hanging over him, the Palestinian-Syrian director remains something of a persona non grata within German cultural circles, still awaiting similar vocal support that has been so readily extended to Tuttle in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, publications around the world have come to the conclusion that it’s nearly impossible to create large-scale democratic cultural events in Germany in such a repressive climate.  

Anti-Palestinian sentiment is unlikely to vanish in Germany anytime soon - at least on an institutional level. 

It is difficult to imagine that Berlinale would risk inviting contentious films or artists like Khatib again in the near future. 

The 2026 edition could therefore prove to be the last for some time to feature edgier Middle Eastern titles, with more major talents from around the globe continuing to turn their backs on a platform where freedom of speech is not protected.

To give the festival’s selection committee its due, the 76th Berlinale was otherwise a formidable edition, boasting the strongest line-up since the banner 2021 edition. 

While the films from Turkey stole the show, the Arab selection - as uneven and patchy as it may have been - still contained intriguing elements, politically if not always formally or cinematically.

Here are some of the most notable Middle Eastern titles from Berlinale 2026.

Chronicles from the Siege 

Khatib burst onto the festival scene with the documentary Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege, a harrowing look at the slow death of the Palestinian-populated Syrian Yarmouk Camp between 2011 and 2015. 

Chronicles from the Siege, his sophmore effort and first foray into fictional storytelling, shares the aesthetic rawness of its predecessor, albeit with a neater narrative structure. 

Set in an unidentified Arab war zone shelled by Israeli bombs that clearly stand in for Gaza, the film is divided into three separate stories, each exploring a different facet of life under military siege.

In the first vignette, a group of friends debate whether to burn the video cassettes of their favourite films to stay warm or preserve the collection of a reclusive video-store owner. 

The second centres on several men squabbling over a single cigarette. The third follows a couple repeatedly interrupted while attempting to have sex.

There is nothing graceful or heroic in Khatib’s Gaza stand-in. The inhabitants of the besieged space he depicts are locked in a Sisyphean struggle for survival and adaptation. 

Rather than foregrounding the overt political rhetoric that has shaped much post-7 October Palestinian cinema, Khatib gravitates toward the elemental experience of life on the battered side of war.  

The result is a starkly different vision of Gaza: an unmistakably liberal perspective populated by strong-willed, deeply flawed, and palpably human characters; figures rarely depicted in their full complexity in the many cinematic portrayals of the Strip where Palestinians are habitually portrayed as helpless, passive victims. 

However, it is a film that is not without its defects. The dialogue occasionally lapses into distracting theatricality, while certain narrative beats, the burning of the videotapes, the intrusive African family knocking on the couple’s door, and the overly contrived ending, are awkwardly handled. 

Moreover, the absence of a clear aesthetic point of view flattens the film’s raw visual energy after the midpoint. 

These shortcomings, nevertheless, do little to diminish the power and political significance of Khatib’s bracingly original perspective.

Yellow Letters

German-Turkish filmmaker Ilker Catak established himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers in a country with a thinning pool of emerging talents thanks to his superb 2023 classroom drama The Teacher’s Lounge, which earned an Oscar nomination for Germany. 

His follow-up, the surprise winner of the Golden Bear, raises the stakes while expanding the thematic terrain of its predecessor. 

Shot entirely in Germany, with Berlin and Hamburg standing in for Ankara and Istanbul respectively, Catak’s fifth feature centres on a theatre director and university professor married to the leading actress in his company. 

After participating in anti-war demonstrations and signing a petition condemning the government, he loses his job and finds himself effectively blacklisted.

A downward spiral ensues for the couple and their daughter, moving with the director’s mother in Istanbul before he takes on taxi driving to make ends meet. 

The wife, meanwhile, receives a lucrative offer in a TV series broadcasted on state TV that the husband deems as blatant selling out. 

Catak lends a glossy sheen to the proceedings coupled with stylised dialogue that harks to Turkey’s famous soap operas. 

This deliberate aesthetic ploy, paired with the aforementioned employment of the German cities which is explicitly announced, augments the protagonists’ increasing dislocation from a place that continues to reject them. 

Based on Erdogan’s rounding up of the artists and academics who condemned the Turkish military‘s operations in the Kurdish regions in 2016, the crackdown resulted in the dismissal and jailing of numerous producers and performers. 

Catak places someone through the wringer, posing difficult questions about the fragile boundary between pragmatic survival and moral compromises when making art under authoritarian rule. 

In that sense, Yellow Letters is unquestionably the most politically pointed Turkish picture in recent years: A multifaceted examination of the thorny relationship between artists and autocratic authorities whose resonance and urgency transcends the borders of the Middle East. 

Only Rebels Win

Equally political but less ambitious is the latest feature by veteran Lebanese director Danielle Arbid (In the Battlefields, Parisienne). 

A remake of Rainer Fassbinder's German classic Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, great Palestinian star Hiam Abbass (Palestine 36, Ramy) plays a lonely Christian Lebanese widow who alienates and incites the ire of her children and neighbours when she falls in love with a Sudanese migrant menial worker (newcomer Mahamat Amine Benrachid). 

The film was originally slated to be shot in Beirut, but, as Arbid notes at the beginning, the Israeli strikes of 2023 forced the production to relocate to Paris, where the Lebanese capital was recreated on a studio set. 

These unusual circumstances suggested a range of possibilities for exploiting the artificiality of the setting, potentially fashioning an expressionistic work that could amplify the story’s heightened emotions and charged milieu.

Alas, Arbid curiously opts for a largely straightforward approach, resulting in a potent and involving, if rudimentary, drama that adheres closely to the Fassbinder original without introducing notable aesthetic flourishes or particularly perceptive sociological insight.

Still, Abbass and Benrachid carry the film with ease. Their story never hits a false note and remains largely affecting and tender all throughout.

However, it is exiled stand-up comedian Shaden Fakih who plays Sana, Abbass's character's daughter, who steals the show, with her hilarious larger-than-life performance, which hints at a more exciting direction had Arbid opted to be more adventurous.    

In a Whisper    

Hiam Abbass also appears in the third feature by Tunisian filmmaker Leyla Bouzid, playing the mother of a Paris-based queer woman who returns to her hometown with her girlfriend, and who conceals her lesbian relationship from the family. 

A subplot revolving around the investigation into the mysterious death of a closeted gay uncle exposes the persistently hostile climate facing LGBTQ+ people even in what is often described as the most liberal state in North Africa, Tunisia.

Bouzid’s tediously shot film reeks of exoticism in both its narrative framing and its details. 

The inclusion of the French girlfriend, who spends much of the film marvelling at the supposed backwardness of Tunisians, a perspective Bouzid treats with disconcerting nonchalance, feels like a transparent device aimed at securing French funding.

In a Whisper is the kind of film in which part of the exposition involves the recital of Tunisian criminal law, underscoring how clearly the project is catered first and foremost to a French audience rather than a local one.

A scene set in a queer club briefly gestures toward Tunisia’s relative openness, or at least tolerance, toward the LGBTQ+ community. 

Yet Bouzid’s vapid, one-note “us versus a bigoted society” discourse soon grows tiresome, particularly as she fails to interrogate, or even mask, her own orientalist gaze.

The history and social position of the queer community in Tunisia is a compound, contested subject that Bouzid reduces to a blunt schematic. 

In a Whisper belongs to the long line of indistinct LGBTQ+ dramas that populate French cinema every month: films that arrive quietly and disappear just as quickly. 

Only its Tunisian setting lends the picture the sense of distinction it desperately seeks - and one it ultimately does not earn. 

A solid addition to the budding queer Arab cinema the film certainly is not. 

Safe Exit 

Egyptian independent cinema makes a welcome return with Mohamed Hammad’s sophomore feature, an austere portrait of a Coptic Christian security guard and aspiring novelist who forms an unlikely bond with a young woman seeking medical treatment she cannot afford.

Largely set in central Cairo and filmed in long, static shots that mirror the suspended existence of its characters, Safe Exit belongs to the socially minded strain of Egyptian independent filmmaking that has become increasingly rare during the censorship-heavy rule of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. 

The security guard is the son of parents slain by Islamic State militants in Libya; the financial compensation he received has provided little respite or stability.

The portrait Hammad draws of Cairo bears little resemblance to Sisi’s neo-liberal, market-driven “new Egypt”.

There are no aspiring entrepreneurs, social media influencers, Mahraganat singers, or app developers riding the country’s newfound fixation on consumption, and no signs of the grand gentrification the Egyptian capital has been enduring over the past decade. 

Hammad’s protagonists are defeated, deflated characters, too exhausted and too ill-equipped to carve a tangible path out of their eternal purgatory. 

The film occasionally recalls the bleak fatalism of early works by Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier,  a sensibility that now feels somewhat dated. 

Yet flashes of humour temper the film’s morbidity, while its daring inclusion of a non-believing Christian protagonist and a brief, non-graphic sex scene constitutes a quietly defiant gesture against the prevailing censorship.

While certainly imperfect, and perhaps ascetic to a fault, Safe Exit nonetheless represents a significant step forward for Hammad, a serious talent that will continue to be honed in works to come.  

Salvation 

The very worthy winner of the Silver Bear, the fifth feature by Turkish maverick Emin Alper further establishes him as the boldest and most politically astute filmmaker working in Turkey today. 

Of Frenzy and Burning Days fame, Alper returns to his preferred rural setting with this parable about an ancient feud between two rival clans that reignites when one returns to reclaim land long seized by the other. 

As the leader of the dominant clan becomes haunted by visions he interprets as divine warnings to defend his territory from the returning tribe, terror and violence erupt.

Structured and shot as an atmospheric folktale, Alper’s gorgeously photographed latest work channels some of the most urgent anxieties haunting populist-led societies today: collective paranoia, the latent violence of tribalism, the instrumentalisation of religion to persecute the “other” and susceptibility to manipulation by charismatic leaders.

Alper’s Anatolian mountainous setting could be anywhere. It is the United States; it is Germany; it is Turkey, and it is unmistakably Israel. 

The film’s most impressive achievement lies in its patient and meticulous demonstration of how power is seized and sustained; how fear remains the most effective tool for mobilising communities; and how any scant breach of collective morality can lead to the irrecoverable tear of civil order and communal consciousness.

In the months to come, Salvation is bound to become a key reference point in conversations surrounding contemporary Middle Eastern cinema.

The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli  

The sophmore feature by visual artist and filmmaker Rania Rafei is a quintessential cinematic document of Tripoli, the northern Lebanese city that has seldom been explored on film.

Divided into four chapters, The Day of Wrath traces the turbulent history of the country’s second-largest city.

It covers the student protests of 1943 that helped ignite the struggle for independence from France; the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabist influence in 1958; the death of Arab nationalism following the defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, and finally the nationwide protests of 2019 that ultimately failed to reshape the entrenched political order.

Interweaving testimonials from longtime residents, interviews with school students largely unaware of their city’s past, and extensive archival material - anchored by a narration framed as an open letter from the director to her deceased father - the film becomes a portal into the psyche of a city.

Tripoli is a place shaped by the bitter legacies of French colonialism and the unfulfilled promises of Arab nationalism.

The takeover of Tripoli by the Islamic Unification Movement during the Lebanese Civil War and the city’s rapid Islamisation form the film’s most intriguing chapter, though one that unfortunately receives less attention than it deserves. 

What ultimately emerges from these overlapping upheavals is a portrait of an Arab city repeatedly swept up in historical forces that have consistently nullified individual agency.

Time and again, the people of Tripoli have been reduced to pawns within a political order that has persistently failed them, one they have rarely been allowed to participate in. 

Today the Mediterranean port has become a shadow of its former self: worn, neglected, and weary, a city scarred by the many revolutions that promised transformation yet delivered none.

Classical in both form and structure, The Day of Wrath might have benefited from a touch more visual dynamism. 

Yet that does little to diminish the magnitude of Rafei’s undertaking, whose epic scope and historical importance make it the first essential Arab documentary of the year.