Muslim family matters in the 2026 Berlinale

An interesting group of films in the 2026 Berlinale (February 12 to 22) deal with Muslim family dynamics. Written and directed by filmmakers born in Afghanistan, Turkey, Tunisia and Senegal, these titles have been financed by European public and private funds and developed in workshops and festival programs in Europe. Their credits may list Middle Eastern and African co-producers, but knowing the previous work of the filmmakers, based in Europe except for one, these films are not native offshoots.  How, when and if these titles will be screened in the countries where the stories unfold, are questions the filmmakers answered, with a degree of ambiguity or wishful thinking, in the press conferences I attended.

Their stories are varied, framed by a Muslim perspective.  In Layla Bouzid’s À voix basse / In a Whisper and Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Men, family dynamics are shaped by strong matriarchs, or populated by resilient women who challenge social and religious mores. Kurtulus / Salvation hinges on families in isolated rural communities run by delusional and fanatic patriarchs. The migration from Muslim Sub Saharan African countries to secular Europe produces a clash between tradition and modernity, in Alain Gomis’ Dao.
 

À voix basse / In a Whisper is set in director Layla Bouzid’s Tunisia (actually shot in her grandmother’s sprawling house in a provincial town) and probes the workings of a middle-class conservative Muslim family when an uncle dies under suspicious circumstances. That he was gay is the secret kept under wraps but punctured by the niece Lilia (Eya Bouteraa), during the week she comes from France for the funeral, with her lesbian couple. The traditions of a proper Muslim burial are shown in detail as are the mourning period rituals.  Lilia’s visit triggers a conflict with her mother, and also fractures the lesbian relationship. The portrayal of a family in crisis vis-à-vis a society that legally and morally condemns homosexual practices comes across as realistic. 

The film keeps the religious and generational confrontations restrained and circumscribed to the inner circle, without veering into melodrama or offering a didactic critique. It is a female-centric narrative, with excellent performances, especially Eya Bouteraa and Hiam Abbass (The Lemon Tree, Succession) as her physician mother, forced to reckon with a daughter gone outside of the tribe. However, the conflict so realistically laid out and developed does not finish in tragedy but in the fantasy that all is good just because it is willed to be. Wishful thinking replaces the reality and the status of homosexual issues in the Muslim world today.

Set in Kabul in the months previous to the U.S. withdrawal of its troops in Afghanistan and the speedy takeover by the Taliban in August 2021, No Good Men is the portrait of Naru, the only woman cameraman in the main TV station of the capital, showing how she negotiates the social stigma of divorce, while carving a spot in a TV news show, where she is first unceremoniously pushed aside.  The writer / director Shahrbanoo Sadat also plays the lead in this lovely rom-com.  Obviously not shot in Kabul, with the Taliban now in power, and in spite of the doom-and-gloom of the political context, quite unexpectedly the film is a funny romantic comedy, with the love affair supplied by the newscaster who originally boycotted her.  The sequence of the interview with a Taliban leader echoes – in a hilarious vein - the tense one of Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci in 1979 with Ayatollah Homeini, where she tossed her chador in protest for the treatment of women. Here the loosely worn hijab gets Naru in major trouble with the misogynist Muslim. The ending is congruent with the story and replicates the director’s own situation, since she now lives in Hamburg. It is lifted straight out of Casablanca, and works beautifully.  
 

No Good Men takes its title from the human-interest story the protagonist puts together after the Taliban fiasco, where she coaxes ordinary women on the street to talk about what Afghan men really are. It is a TV hit, with funny and universal insights.  The film should do very well with international audiences.

In Kurtulus / Salvation, written and directed by Emin Alper, who has a Ph.D. in modern Turkey history, and a filmmaker since 2012, unveils a world unfamiliar to Western audiences. Set in a beautiful area of Anatolia, where making a living is hard, the film explores how a feud of long date escalates between two ethnic communities claiming the favor of Allah. The dynamics of small-town government are quietly observed in the daily prayers of men and women – separated by a screen in the local mosque – whose rousing singing and rhythmic drum beating is a call to battle their ancestral enemies. Mesut, the local sheik’s brother, challenges his leadership, defenestrating the religious scholar. His feverish dreams and premonitions plunge the community into path of violence, an ironic twist on the film’s title.  Salvation captures the explosive dynamics of a people for whom the religious and the secular are sides of the same coin. 
 
In the press conference, the director discussed Salvation as a metaphor applicable to any extreme ideology today manipulated by irrational leaders. But by circumscribing it, in a referential level, to a contemporary Muslim context, the director provides, through plot and dialogue an insider’s view aimed at Western audiences. One cannot see how the film can ever open in Erdogan’s Turkey.