Culture

From coffeehouse storytellers to digital archives, communities across the Arab world have long shaped and shared history in public, challenging the idea that the archive owns the past

A cornerstone of Turkey’s independent media since 1995, Açık Radyo lost its FM license in 2024 but continues to fight censorship while broadcasting online

From erased graffiti to banned symbols, Germany’s crackdown on Palestinian street art exposes how aesthetics become acts of resistance, memory, and defiance in the struggle for visibility.

In this interview, Refqa Abu-Remaileh maps a fragmented literary history shaped by exile, censorship, and resilience—offering an interactive archive that reimagines Palestinian literature beyond borders, timelines, and linear national narratives.

Spain’s palmereros are battling EU safety laws and legal limbo to protect their centuries-old palm-climbing craft—and are now seeking UNESCO recognition to keep the tradition alive.

The Algerian feminist’s cinematography creates a space for exploring trauma and memory in Algerian society through workshops led together with the Collective Cinéma Mémoire. 

In a colonial context, reworking images is an act of liberation and reclaiming, a way to tell stories of a lost homeland.

Amid the cracked tiles of the German Foreigners’ Office, Aras feels the weight of a people caught up in a circle of revolutionary upheaval, their horrific suppression and a bureaucracy of exile.

Peter Wollen’s sci-fi parable of solidarity, screened at On Strike Berlin, speaks powerfully to today’s calls for boycott and the ethical urgency of bearing witness.

so, tell me. when do we mourn the living dead that we are, the muted throats that we occupy, the stones we pick and leave behind, the lives we exploit and live beside?

Amr Gamal’s “The Burdened” is a story of sacrifice and survival that captures Yemen’s grim reality, where poverty often proves more lethal than the bullets of war.

Radio Alhara and other community radios amplify Palestinian resistance, blending music, politics, and global solidarity to challenge colonial violence.

The tragedy of musicians in detention, forced to create their own instruments from the simplest materials to endure the endless night of imprisonment.

From underground beats to revolutionary anthems, Sudanese rap is now carrying the weight of war and narrating stories of displacement and dreams of return.

In the face of destruction and enforced forgetfulness, the madness of remembering is a weapon to reclaim Beirut’s identity and resist a world order built on erasure and imperial dominance.

Humaira Bilkis’ documentary exposes the neglected stories of Bangladesh's tea workers, whose colonial past and exclusion from recent revolutionary changes reveal deep, systemic inequalities.

Singing in Urdu, Punjabi, and Farsi, a punk band is creating a space for migrants in the country’s alternative music scene.

The son of a former Algerian diplomat reconciles with his heritage after working at a Muslim burial house.

The city’s cultural policies commodify artistic expression and manipulate diversity, perpetuating power imbalances and constrains genuine cultural innovation.

Set in a sand-swept Gulf city, Yellow Bus follows an Indian mother’s relentless pursuit of justice against an oppressive neoliberal system. This debut film captivates with its emotional depth a woman's fight for accountability.

Syrian writer Rasha Abbas and Palestinian artist Muhammad Jabali, in conversation with Diana Abbani, discuss the evolving dynamics and narratives shaping Berlin, a city once envisioned as an Arab cultural hub.

Music can amplify the voices of struggles and has a long history in liberation movements, says the Lebanese rapper.

Following the sudden death of her husband, a Jordanian woman finds herself confronting an oppressive male-world.

A stunning film that follows the journey of a middle-class Yemeni family as the everyday becomes progressively more difficult to manage.

The strange story of the abandoned Moorish cemetery in Asturias where hundreds of Moroccan soldiers who died fighting on Franco's side during the Spanish Civil War are buried.

Palestinian lives and cause are spotlighted at Berlin's AlFilm Festival amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and unprecedented censorship in Germany

This 15th edition of the festival comes amid criticism aimed at German authorities and the Berlin Senate for silencing pro-Palestinian voices.

Aijaz Ahmad’s story may not be known to many outside a few selective international leftist circles, but it is one of exile, colonialism, and resistance that resonates in many parts of the Global South today.

The revival of Libyan literature in the past decade has been challenged by threats, harm, intimidation and censorship. Yet, in 2022, a Libyan novel won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Intimate encounters with a few plants and people along a pilgrimage route. What visions of an alternative future appear through these encounters and how can we renew the ways we relate to and inhabit the world around us?