Morgenkreis (Basma Alsharif, 2025)

I’ve been a fan of Basma Alsharif’s work since I saw her first film, We Began By Measuring Distance, however many years ago. She’s one of the sharpest political filmmakers in the recent avant garde, combining absorptive visual and auditory material with formal conceits that complicate and rework the elements of narrative, documentary, or essay. Most of her films have “twists” in a formal rather than narrative sense, as we realize that footage is being shown in reverse, or that the archival materials we’re watching are projected on a painted wall with the paint slowly being removed. This is never a simple reversal but always an effort to demonstrate something profoundly dislocated, distant, upside down in the experience of diaspora and of cultural and political violence.

Morgenkreis is no different in this sense, and is perhaps Alsharif’s best and most complex work to date. It’s loosely narrative, in three or four apparently distinct segments which effectively determine each other’s meaning. The first is a steadicam trip through Berlin’s streets, in a car and then on foot. It’s observational and environmentally focused, but not exactly a city symphony, as the camera has a decidedly specific (though for now anonymous) point of view. Significantly, we see the marks of immigrant populations built into the city, in an uneven integration. When the camera’s POV aims upward, we see modernist glass architecture and Coca-Cola signs, but at the street level are primarily Asian and Arabic shops and restaurants.

The second segment begins when the this urban voyage terminates in an apartment where a man stands smoking by the window. An unseen bureaucrat asks the man questions: why did he come to Germany, and does he like it here? Is he Muslim, and is the mother of his child? Has he made friends outside his community? The questions, standing in for the state itself, contain an obvious implicit threat, but the questioned man also obviously finds them absurd. He’s not Muslim, he can’t answer questions on behalf of his ex, and this whole exchange is detached from his real experience. But what makes this dialogue particularly unsettling is that the viewer is placed into the perspective of the agent of the German state. The earlier segment, we realize now, was his/our trip into a multiracial part of the city to interrogate this man, identified only as Mr. Abrahamyan (an Armenian name meaning “son of Abraham,” another detail that suggests the dual commonality and distance of cultural assumptions). A transparently ideological but stark gulf is created between the implicitly white German identity of the bureaucrat and the always suspect and partial Germanness of the immigrant. That distance and its artifice are reinforced when it becomes clear that Abrahamyan and his interlocutor are not even in the same room but separated by a wall of glass, noticeable around the edges of the frame but not in the scene’s sound design.

The final section follows Abrahamyan and his son as the latter wakes up with his Squirtle plushie and the two walk together to a daycare. The transition from bureaucratic formality to familial intimacy is disturbed by a few non-diegetic interjections of the state agent, still heard even when no longer physically present. The camera mostly follows the protagonists but at one point watches them through the window as they leave their building. The voice and eyes of the state are never entirely absent. The father notices dirt in his son’s fingernails and clips them, lovingly puts his gloves on; they stop at a swingset in an eerily empty playground, kick a soccer ball back and forth. This series of sweet and quiet moments aren’t allowed to feel safe or relaxed, the intimacy always intruded on, not least by our own point of view which has already been identified as external.

When they get to the daycare, the teachers–and there are apparently three of them for one class, unthinkable in America–are warm and kind and encourage the son, Adnan, to come in. He clings to his father and doesn’t want to leave. Subtitles note that the kid is speaking Armenian, which adds further irony to the assumption that anyone who looks like this and comes from the Middle East must be Muslim and Arabic-speaking. The voice of the state agent returns, asking even more direct questions: do you identify with Germany? Have you tried to integrate? Cuts become much quicker and the camera moves around in circular motion. The political and parental anxiety that has accumulated throughout the film intensifies quickly as father and son have to separate, an apparently ordinary daily routine that is here invested with many layers of tension and emotional difficulty.

The final few minutes of the film, after Mr. Abrahamyan has left his son, show the son in his class as music gets louder, footage of Gazans returning home overlaps the kids dancing, and everything erupts into an explosion of dizzying motion, sound, and color. The multiple exposure and music disappears and Adnan spins and falls to the ground.

This climax is more powerful than a description can do justice. A big part of this is the film’s excellent use of sound. The opening trip through the city features a soft but pulsing and escalating electronic track. It suddenly goes quiet when the interview in the apartment begins. Much more intense music suddenly reappears for just a few seconds in a startling way during the quiet scenes where Adnan gets ready to leave for school, and the same music comes back for the climax. In fact this is all the same song, “Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot)” by Maurice Louca, but employed discontinuously to build anxiety and allow the final moments an explosive release of tension. Another key element is the complex relationship between, on the one hand, the intimacy of father and son, and on the other, the alienation of both from this new environment. These things are never allowed to be separate, the intimacy always intruded on by external powers. The identification of the camera–and by extension us, the audience–with those external powers, and later the way the daycare workers inhabit an irreducible mix of this personal intimacy and bureaucratic alienation, challenge the common assumptions of realist narrative and of cinema as an “empathy machine.” Indeed this is an empathetic film, but one that sees empathy as useful only to the extent that it recognizes difference and structures of power, and which refuses to dissolve these into an easy identification of camera and subject.