Cinema and the Arab World

On these pages you will find a range of services of free-lance author, curator and scholar Irit Neidhardt in the field of Cinema and the Arab World. For requests, please contact me at the address below.

I deal with questions of production, presentation and reception of films with regards to aspects of Arab societies and politics, the European gaze on its neighboring region in the southern and eastern Mediterranean as well as facets of European-Arab cooperation, including historical periods of Arab filmmaking in Germany. 
This includes subjects as the cooperation of both German States with the Palestinian Liberation Organization PLO in the 1970s and 1980s; the genre of the music video which is very popular in the Arab World; the critical-analytical examination of European funding of Arab movies; Arab women films from the years before the uprisings that started in Tunisia in 2010 or the question about the origin of the images we see from and about the war in Syria. 
Since 2012 I have been compiling the Funding Guide for Arab Filmmakers and Producers on behalf of Aflamuna (formerly Beirut DC) which is by now accessible online.

To get a more precise idea about my services with regard to
- curating of film programs
- lectures and film talks
- workshops and tutorials
- panel discussions
- moderations
- publications
you are invited to browse around this homepage. In each section you will find examples and references to previous activities.

Learn about mec film, the distribution and sales company for films by Arab directors which I run or find information about me.

 

Coming Soon

(photo: bpb)


Curation
13.-19.6.2025 at the Anthology Film Archives New York (USA)
Politics of the Image: Collaborations Between the Palestinian Liberation Movement and the Two Germanies
This series sheds light on the little known and rarely explored cooperation in film and TV between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the two Germanies during the last decades of the Cold War. In the 1970s and 80s, the film groups and cultural organizations of the PLO worked closely with film institutions in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and with filmmakers from the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). These collaborations continue to have an impact today, continue


Previous entries were moved to the News Archive.