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Join us for an evening with films by Khaled Abdulwahed. The filmscreening, partly a Leipzig-Premiere, is followed by a discussion with the filmmaker – circling around the question of "distance" in various ways. The language of discussion is English.

Backyard, 26 min, 2018
The experimental short film deconstructs and reconstructs copies of the photograph of a Syrian cactus field projected on a wall in a flat in a Berlin backyard.  In autumn 1998, near his home in the southwest of Damascus, Khaled Abdulwahed took a landscape photograph of a cactus field on a 35mm chrome film. The old cactus fields in that area link the city with the countryside. Cacti grow all over the Middle East and are used for their fruits and as borders between houses and villages. The thorny, tough plant is also a symbol of resilience. The cactus field in Khaled’s film “backyard” was destroyed during the uprising in the summer of 2012, while the war started to form a new landscape.

Background, 64 min, 2023
A photo camera is cleaned. Click. The shutter works. Bright light. A crackle and hiss in the sound. A broken "Hello?" opens a conversation between Khaled Abdulwahed, a Syrian filmmaker living in Leipzig, and his father in Aleppo. The son reconstructs his father's journey, arriving in the GDR as an exchange student in 1956. His son applies for asylum more than 60 years later as a refugee. The civil war in Syria separates their stories, the film brings them back together and continues them.

Khaled Abdulwahed is an artist, filmmaker and photographer based in Leipzig. From 1996 to 2000, he studied fine art and graphic design at the Adham Ismail Art School in Damascus and at Frederick University in Nicosia. Between 2002 and 2008, he exhibited his artistic work in art spaces and galleries in the Middle East and Europe. Since 2011, Abdulwahed has been realising artistic video works that have been shown in art institutions, festivals, universities and on television worldwide. In 2015 he was invited to Berlinale Talents.