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What does mec film do?

mec film is an international sales and distribution company exclusively for films by Arab directors. The company was founded by Irit Neidhardt in 2002 and is based in Berlin, Germany.

We add one feature length film for distribution in German theatres and up to four works for international sales per year. The shortest film in the catalogue lasts for only five minutes, the longest glues the viewers to their chairs for four and a half hours. Except for the length of the works for theatrical releases, we had no general limit to genre and form. Experimental films can be found at mec film as well as fiction films, essayistic works or classical documentaries.

mec film serves as agent for the Œuvre of renown Syrian director Mohamad Malas.

A large part of the works in the catalogues of this website can be found in our web-shop mecfilm-shop.com. There you also find additional films by Arab directors.
Films distributed by mec film can be borrowed in selected libraries all over the globe or accessed with university library cards via the digital supplier kanopy.

mec film works with cinemas, festivals, museums, cultural initiatives, universities or neighbourhood centres. sooner in Berlin, MMedia in Beirut and minaa in Amman licensed part of the mec film titles for their VOD and streaming channels.

The MoMA in New York bought Mohamad Shawky Hassan’s And on a Different Note (Egypt 2015) for its permanent collection and CNAP in France Ghassan Halwani's Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible. BBC Arabic broadcasts short films from our catalogue in their Cinema Badila (Alternative Cinema) slot quite regularly. 

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Who runs mec film?

Irit Neidhardt
Irit Neidhardt has been working as free-lance author, curator and teacher in the field of cinema and the Middle East since 1995. In 2002 she founded mec film.
She is author of numerous articles about Arab cinema in which she is focusing on questions of cooperation and co-production between Europe and the Middle East as well as co-producer of several Arab documentary films.
Irit Neidhardt is a member of the German Association of Arthouse Theatres (AG Kino-Gilde), the German Documentary Association (AG Dok) and the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation (DAVO). She is a member of the advisory board of the German edition of the Global Media Journal and of the editorial board of German Quarterly inamo (Information Project Near and Middle East).


Sabina Rolle
Sabina Rolle studied audio visual media science at the Konrad Wolff Film University in Potsdam Babelsberg and political science at the Free University in Berlin. In addition to teaching in the field of Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin she worked for different film distribution companies before assuming the office management of HMR Production in Berlin. Currently she is responsible for the fields of financing, accounting and controlling at the startup Sensorberg GmbH.

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