From Mohammad Rasoulof, Maryna Er Gorbach, Hassan Kattan, Shahrbanoo Sadat en Mo Harawe
In cooperation with
IFFR Displacement Film Fund
Five filmmakers from Afghanistan, Iran,Ukraine, Syria and Somalia each made a new short film.Maryna Er Gorbach, Mo Harawe, Hasan Kattan,Mohammad Rasoulof and Shahrbanoo Sadat offer timely and intimate reflections on experiences of displacement.
1. Allies in Exile (2026) – Hasan Kattan, United Kingdom, Syria, 40 min. Two Syrian Filmmakers with past shaped by war document the trauma of waiting for asylum, using friendship and storytelling to survive exile.
2. Rotation (2026) – Maryna Er Gorbach, Ukraine, Turkey, 12 min. Rotation is a therapeutic hypnosis ritual experienced by a young Ukrainian woman who shifted from civilian life to military service. She needs support to adapt to the displaced reality she now lives in.
3. Sense of Water (2026) – Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, Germany, 39 min. In the chill of exile, an Iranian writer confronts a foreign language – a language in which he must rediscover love, anger, joy and sorrow in order to write again. His quest to reclaim the power of writing becomes an inner journey between memory and forgetting, between a lost language and a new one, where human emotion and meaning must be recreated anew.
4. Super Afghan Gym (2026) – Shahrbanoo Sadat, Germany, 14 min. In a gym in downtown Kabul, a group of housewives gather during the only hour of the day reserved for women. They train at lunchtime behind closed doors, talking about body norms and their daily life.
5. Whispers of a Burning Scent (2026) – Mo Harawe, Somalia, Austria, Germany, 28 min. A quiet wedding musician finds his private life exposed to public scrutiny. The five films screen together as a single 133-minute programme. All films have English subtitles.
About IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) presents a leading festival and year-round programme that deepens appreciation of cinema in all its forms and creates opportunities for independent filmmakers and artists from around the globe.
About the Displacement Film Fund Since 2025 the Displacement Film Fund (DFF) champions and funds the work of displaced filmmakers, or filmmakers with a proven track record in creating authentic storytelling on the experiences of displaced people. In the pilot scheme five displaced filmmakers received a production grant of €100,000 each to make a short film. The resulting films world premiered at IFFR 2026.
