A World Not Ours

An intimate and dark humoristic portrait of three generations of Palestinian refugees in Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp in South Lebanon, where Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel grew up. In his film, he utilises a wealth of personal footage, family archives and historical footage, including videos his father shot in the 1980s and 1990s. The archival material offers plenty of political background for this cinematic diary.

Mahdi Fleifel

Filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel was born in Dubai, grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon and moved to Denmark when he was nine. The meaning of exile is a recurring theme in his oeuvre. Not on the basis of statistics, but by giving refugees a face and allowing them to tell their stories.

Fleifel first ventured into filmmaking in Wales (UK), after which he received a scholarship to study at the National Film and Television School, which was followed by a year of post-graduate work at Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam. In 2015, the Binger Filmlab, the Nederlandse Filmacademie, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and Eye selected him for the 3Package Deal, a scheme set up by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst which subsidises a development budget and affordable living/working space for top talents from around the globe. He is currently working on his first feature film Men in the Sun.