Making a Scene, Behind The Screen Workshop

With Kareem Jamaal Baholzer und Madi Awadalla, in collaboration with PART (Outreach gGmbH) and XPOSED Queer Film Festival

The one-day workshop Making a Scene, Behind the Screen begins with a shared experience of watching, feeling, and discussing short films in conversation with a filmmaker. Participants are invited to see film not merely as a finished product, but as the result of experience, expression, and decision-making. How does a film emerge from personal experience? How does an idea make its way to the screen? What kind of impact can filmmakers have?

Building on these questions, the second part of the workshop focuses on curation and explores how films continue their journey after completion: how they are selected, framed, and made visible. It introduces the act of choosing perspectives and stories as a critical and collective practice.

No prior experience is required. The workshop emphasizes presence, exchange, and collaborative thinking. Its aim is to empower participants as critical viewers and active decision-makers. The workshop is going to be in the German language.

Madi Awadalla is a writer, historian, and transdisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, visual storytelling, and multiple forms of writing. Grounded in counter-histories, archival intervention, and embodied research, their work engages critical debates on public health, sexuality, diaspora, and the afterlives of colonialism.

Kareem Jamaal Baholzer is a writer, film programmer and -maker approaching cinema through a critical lens, attentive to power structures. Currently, they are working in the committee Non-Fiction for the Zürcher Filmstiftung, are a programmer at the XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin and working on several projects centering communal practice and self-expression.

PART is the mobile youth participation team of the organization Outreach in the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district. Through low-threshold, needs-based offerings in the context of mobile youth work, Mert and Nuri promote the participation and self-efficacy of young people in the district who are often not reached by traditional participation formats.

Outreach gGmbH is an independent provider of mobile youth (social) work in Berlin. The 60 Outreach teams work in their respective neighborhoods, always where young people actually are: in parks, on the streets, in youth centers, and in public spaces. Outreach combines different approaches and methods to reach young people who often do not take advantage of institutional youth work offerings.

XPOSED Queer Film Festival has exhibited the works of independent queer filmmakers beyond traditional coming out stories since 2006. Often experimental and personal, the films shown at the festival delve into the expressions and realities of queer people from many regions worldwide. Queer Exile premiered at XPOSED in 2024.