Dir: Ahmad Abdalla | Drama 2026
Berlin may be one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities, but you would hardly know it from Ahmad Abdalla’s BerleeN_, a film about three Arab migrants whose arrival in the German capital seems to have brought with it a curious suspension of both reality and common sense.
Set over a single day, the film weaves together the stories of three characters: Mai, who finds herself mistaken for a dead woman; Hana, whose camera apparently offers glimpses of parallel realities; and Hassan, who is haunted by mysterious musical sounds while pursuing revenge. It’s an intriguing enough collection of ingredients, but the resulting concoction feels considerably less exotic than its director seems to imagine.
The trouble begins with the characters themselves. Rather than emerging as recognisable, complicated human beings with individual histories, contradictions and personalities, the three protagonists feel suspiciously like stock figures assembled to illustrate familiar themes of displacement, alienation and the immigrant experience. They are less people we get to know than narrative devices required to service the screenplay’s increasingly self-conscious surrealism. And then there is the rather bizarre question of language.
Why, having arrived in Berlin, does none of these characters want ti speak decent German? The film is listed as an Arabic-language production, but that is not quite the same thing as explaining away the absence of a real effort to learn the native language of the country that has so generously offered them refuge. These are people supposedly navigating life in one of Europe’s major cities, yet the everyday business of communicating, negotiating, misunderstanding and occasionally getting lost in translation seems strangely peripheral. Where are the awkward encounters with bureaucracy, the linguistic ‘lost in translation’ episodes that make the immigrant experience recognisable? Berlin becomes a convenient geographical label rather than a living social environment.
It is an especially curious omission because language is surely one of the most immediate markers of belonging and exclusion. Instead, the characters appear to inhabit a sort of Arabic-speaking bubble, insulated from the very society in which they are supposedly trying to establish their lives. Some German is spoken but you do begin to wonder whether they have actually emigrated or simply wandered onto a rather expensive Egyptian film set with German street signs.
Abdalla is clearly aiming for something more elusive than straightforward social realism. The intersecting narratives, strange coincidences and incursions into alternative realities suggest a desire to explore the psychological dislocation of people caught between past and present, memory and imagination. But surrealism is not an automatic passport to profundity. Without sufficiently developed characters or an emotional centre, eccentricity can quickly become an end in itself.
Berlin, meanwhile, is curiously underused. A city so rich in history, cultural friction and contemporary contradictions should offer an extraordinary cinematic playground. Yet here it feels more like a suitably atmospheric backdrop against which the director can arrange his characters and their various existential predicaments. The city never quite gets under their skin, nor do they convincingly get under ours.
The performances cannot entirely overcome the limitations of the writing. There are moments when the actors suggest more nuanced, complicated individuals than the screenplay allows them to become. But the film keeps pulling us back towards its predetermined – and to often heavily relied upon – mystery and metaphor.
Ultimately, BerleeN_ wants to say something about displacement, identity and the difficulty of belonging, but never quite does the hard work of making us feel those things. Its characters are so heavily burdened with symbolic significance that they struggle to acquire ordinary human dimensions.
For a film about immigrants in Berlin, it is oddly detached from the realities of being an immigrant in Berlin. The irony is that the three protagonists seem every bit as foreign to the film’s own world as they are supposed to be to their adopted city.
A promising premise, then, but one that gets lost somewhere between Cairo and Berlin – and apparently without a German phrasebook.
Editorial note: The film is Ahmed Abdalla’s seventh feature and had its world premiere in the Cairo International Film Festival’s International Competition on 13 November 2026. The Arabic-language designation is confirmed in the Film Clinic catalogue.
CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL | International Competition 2026