Effective December 2020, Karin Schyle will be the Executive Director and Pascale Fakhry will lead the festival as Artistic Director.
Arab Film Festival Berlin (ALFILM) has announced Karin Schyle and Pascale Fakhry as the festival’s new Executive Director and Artistic Director respectively. Effective December 2020, Schyle and Fakhry will lead the 12th edition of the festival as a team.
Schyle, ALFILM’s new Executive Director, is a cultural manager and looks back on over 20 years of experience with major international events in the fields of art, culture and the film world. From 2004 to 2009, she was Festival Manager at the goEast – Film Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Frankfurt/Wiesbaden.
Since 2010 she has been the Coordinator and Curator of the Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung, a year-long training and competition programme for German-Arab co-productions, which ends in 2021.
Fakhry, ALFILM’s new Artistic Director, holds a PhD in Film and Gender Studies from Paris 3 University (Sorbonne Nouvelle) – France. She is also the author of numerous articles on Gender and Representation in American genre films.
She started to work with ALFILM in 2013 as a programmer and an organiser. She is also a Film editor and worked on many Feature and Documentary film projects. From 2015 until August 2020, she lived in Beirut, where she led the project “Cinema on the Road” for Metropolis Cinema.
In a statement, the festival said: “We thank Claudia Jubeh and Fadi Abdelnour for their trust and for the valuable work they’ve done. With the 12th edition, we will guide ALFILM through the challenges of this time and look forward to working with ALFILM’s team and with long-time partners and friends of the festival.”