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Montreal-based filmmaker Meryam Joobeur made an international splash with her Oscar-nominated “Brotherhood,” winning considerable acclaim for a 2018 short about a rural Tunisian family wracked with heartache once the eldest son returns home after fighting for Isis. Premiering in competition in Berlin, Joobeur’s feature debut “Who Do I Belong To” builds on the same premise and keeps the same cast, but the filmmaker does not see her latest film as an extension or reimagining.

Instead, “Who Do I Belong To” reframes the narrative around a more female perspective, focusing on the family matriarch Aisha (Salha Nasraoui) who is torn between relief, grief and guilt when only one of her two escaped sons comes home. What’s more, he returns with a pregnant Syrian bride, unspeaking and unsettled beneath a full-body niqab. The feature also works in new tones, playing with magical realism and full-blown horror to better explore the story’s darkest corners.

Through evocative imagery and simmering emotion, director Meryam Joobeur crafts a mesmerising story of fractured relationships and vengeful violence. Focusing on the repercussions of two sons abandoning their rural home to engage in war, her feature debut increasingly becomes more visceral. Starting as a refined drama about a broken Tunisian family, the narrative becomes a complex meditation on attachment and motherhood, all encompassed by a remarkable female lead.

The gruelling burden of a broken family is felt from the very first minutes we see Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui), who aches for the safe return of her sons. Telling close-ups of her dispirited expression mark a deep internal struggle, Joobeur focusing on a motherly love which brims on obsession and outweighs the worry of the other family members. Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa), burying his conflicting emotions in farm work, can't begin to fathom what will happen if his older sons return, especially after.

Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui) and her husband Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) live on a farm in northern Tunisia. It’s a modern rural environment of goats, trucks, home cooking and tight-knit families. In Meryam Joobeur’s feature-length debut “Who Do I Belong To,” an early sequence of Aïcha shaving Brahim’s face — an act of intimacy and trust — introduces a key part of the director’s aesthetic strategy: Dp Vincent Gonneville’s frequent use of extreme close-ups on the actors’ faces. At times, the camera hovers so close that they almost stop looking like faces at all; there’s a landscape quality to facial features observed from this kind of intense proximity. In the shaving scene, Grayaa’s cheeks, lathered with shaving foam, call to mind mountains buried under drifts of snow.

You might expect from this introduction that Brahim, this monumental patriarch, will play a bigger part in the subsequently unfolding events,...

Meryam Joobeur’s Who Do I Belong To (Mé el Aïn) offers a timely perspective on war in the Middle East as her Arabic language Isis drama about a family in turmoil premieres in competition at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival.

The Canadian-Tunisian director deftly threads the themes of conflict, family and identity in a fantastical drama that centers on Aicha, a Tunisian mother played by Salha Nasraoui and greatly relieved to see her eldest son Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) unexpectedly return from fighting for the Islamic State in Syria.

But Aicha must deal with her husband Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) feeling anger over their son’s betrayal for leaving their rural farm in Tunisia to embrace a violent war and return without his brother Amine and with a mysterious pregnant wife at his side. Soon, the presence of Mehdi and his niqab-clad wife casts a dark shadow that threatens to consume a tiny Tunisian village.

The Berlin Film Festival on Monday unveiled the titles selected for its official competition and its sidebar Encounters competitive section.

A total of 20 films have been selected for the international competition, with highlights including La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruiz Palacios and starring Rooney Mara. The pic is described as a “kinetic and cinematic love story” set over a single day in a Times Square kitchen. French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop returns with Dahomey, a 60-minute doc about art repatriation and Hong Sangsoo plays in competition with A Traveler’s Needs, starring Isabelle Huppert. Scroll down for the full lineup.

The Berlin Film Festival takes place February 15-25.

Organizers have already announced more than 100 titles across sidebars spanning Panorama, Forum, and Berlinale Special. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a feature documentary about influential British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger narrated by Killers of the Flower Moon...