Arts Unveiled – Making Films Against the Odds
No matter how difficult the conditions, there’s only one thing that matters to these artists: making films. Forbidden scenes from Egypt, bold young people in Sierra Leone, behind closed doors in Iran, and the hidden world of an Indigenous community in the Brazilian rainforest. Along with 200 other international talents, the filmmakers were guests at Berlinale Talents, the Berlin Film Festival’s global networking program.
Congolese-Iranian director Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a fighter. She worked as a human rights lawyer for the United Nations before turning to film. She grew up as part of the Black minority in Tehran and remembers feeling like the only Black girl she ever saw. Her films explore Black identity and memory. She develops her poetic film essays while working between South Africa and Sierra Leone.
Egyptian actor Mohamed Hatem is fully committed to his craft. In the TV series Betloo El Rooh, he plays a man who becomes an extremist and joins the Islamic State, taking his wife and child from Egypt to Syria.
We met Iranian costume designer Hoda Mirzaee in Berlin shortly after protests erupted in Iran, before the conflict between the U.S. and Iran began. She lives and works in Tehran, where she contributes to major film productions. At the time, she told us how challenging it was to design costumes for films in such a restrictive environment.
For Spanish cinematographer Pedro J. Márquez, working on the award-winning documentary “A Última Floresta” was a turning point in his career. Filmed with the Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest, the project broadened his perspective on ancestry, responsibility and the power of cinema.
