Films by Khaled Abdulwahed

Germany 2023, 64 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed

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 BACKGROUND brings them back together and continues t

Germany 2020, 67 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed, Amel Alzakout

“I see everything,” she says, as if it was a curse. Brilliant sunshine, clear blue skies. The sea is calm, framed by a piece of railing. Buzzing voices. A peaceful moment if it weren’t for the fact that the sea is standing upright, vertical, like a waterfall. A rush of images, twirling, upside down, jolting. People in the boat, in the water, screams, life jackets, emergency whistles. Fluorescent orange, geometrical shapes cast by the sun.There’s no horizon any more, no sky, no up or down, only d

2018, 26 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed

The experimental short film deconstructs and reconstructs a photograph taken in 1998 of a Syrian cactus field, a plant known for its resilience. War and its havoc have been there. 20 years later there only remains this photograph 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. C