In the film “Morgenkreis | Morning Circle” (2025) by Berlin-based Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif, a poignant scene takes place at the entrance of a daycare center. A young boy clings to his father, holding tightly to his coat, as he tries to gently free himself. Nearby, a daycare worker crouches, trying to distract the child and encourage him to go inside. This ordinary yet emotionally charged moment evokes the universal fear of separation.
The scene’s political undertone is rooted in its setting. Kindergarten, introduced in Germany in the 19th century, became pivotal in the European liberal framework. Traditionally, it serves as an initial step for state intervention in a child’s socialization, influencing their citizenship through discipline, language, and routines like the morning circle. This process involves a controlled transition from family to institution, home to nation, and personal to public life.
Basma al-Sharif, whose work reflects her diasporic experiences, highlights how the trauma of being separated from one’s homeland mirrors the forced separation of a child from a parent. This shared human experience makes historic exiles more relatable.
However, al-Sharif also reveals the hidden violence within this seemingly benign structure. The kindergarten symbolizes a broader European modernity fantasy, where the “other” is assimilated through liberal institutions’ “civilizing” processes. The seemingly universal developmental rituals expose their ideological roots, where the child’s separation from a parent parallels the estrangement of refugees from their homeland and colonized individuals from their history and identity.
In late 2025, al-Sharif was invited to present “Morgenkreis” and another short film in January at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, organized by the student collective SPARTA. After a brief email hiatus to meet holiday deadlines, she returned to find herself embroiled in a media controversy. The uproar, ironically, was not about her work but her social media posts referencing historical injustices and resistance symbols, which, amid the ongoing Gaza genocide, have been challenged in global human rights discourse.
A pro-Israel advocacy group within the conservative Christian Democratic Party spearheaded a smear campaign, compiling screenshots of her Instagram posts about Palestine’s occupation and issuing an open letter to cancel her screening and talk. Public officials, including Düsseldorf’s mayor, its non-Jewish antisemitism commissioner, and a cultural minister, joined in, part of a broader effort to silence Palestinian voices and their allies amid rising anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia disguised as historical guilt.
In a surprising move amid Germany’s political climate of preemptive obedience and denunciation, the academy’s director, Donatella Fioretti, refused to cancel the event, opting instead to restrict attendance to academy members for safety amid online threats. On January 21, protestors gathered outside, reiterating accusations heard at many elite institutions, while the artist was escorted in through a back entrance. The same bureaucracy that dismissed Joseph Beuys in 1972 now seeks the resignation of an administrator for maintaining the university as a space for dialogue and critical exchange, a rare stand in today’s German discourse.
Confronting both a lack of empathy and historical revisionism as an artist in Germany during her people’s ongoing genocide, al-Sharif has crafted a unique portrayal of diaspora life under occupation. She identifies as “someone who is essentially not from anywhere” and embraces the label “post-Palestinian,” acknowledging her privilege of not experiencing occupation violence firsthand yet being deeply influenced by it, alongside the exile’s nostalgia and loss. As al-Sharif and those attending her Berlin talk shortly afterward understand, the real battleground is not social media but her art, where she aims to connect viewers viscerally to the Palestinian struggle.
Al-Sharif’s “Morgenkreis” contrasts the Berlin of 2025 with Wim Wenders’s 1987 depiction in Wings of Desire. Comparing their approach to politics and cinema, Wenders claimed his work was the opposite of politics, while al-Sharif, as a Palestinian filmmaker, recognizes every film as inherently political. Wings of Desire portrays the desire to become human through a universal subjectivity that marginalizes the collective “other” outside the European experience, whereas al-Sharif’s work is steeped in her political reality.
Set in a somber modern Berlin, “Morgenkreis” lacks the romanticism of Wenders’s film. While Wenders captures Berlin through iconic landmarks, al-Sharif’s lens, accompanied by a slowed-down Al Jazeera theme, navigates restrictive spaces like cars, housing complexes, and bureaucratic interiors controlling specific populations.
In Wenders’s film, angels unseen by all but children wander Potsdamer Platz in 1987, before gentrification began. In contrast, al-Sharif’s camera encounters the unwelcoming glass and steel of corporate finance. The city is capital-occupied, with buildings as reflective barriers, denying access to the disoriented. When entering an Armenian-Lebanese home, the camera captures an interviewer’s invasive questions about assimilation, highlighting integration’s marginalizing violence. Twice, it passes a TV displaying Gaza’s destroyed neighborhoods, filmed by Yaser Murtaja, who was killed during the 2018 March of Return.
Subtle acts of resistance are evident: the mother, likely working, avoids the interrogation, while the father humorously deflects questions and shares private jokes with his son in Arabic. The son’s rebellion unfolds later; separated from his father, he enters the kindergarten, observed by others. A caretaker leads the children in a playful revolt, freeing him from the morning circle. The camera spins to capture the children’s ecstatic dance, interspersed with footage of Gazans returning home post-ceasefire in January 2025. Accompanied by Maurice Louca’s music, a voice warns, “Wake up / don’t fall asleep / we’re saluting the parrot.”
Once free from the kindergarten, the boy spins alone on the playground, dizzy and unsteady. This scene of innocent joy is shadowed by the past three years of witnessing similar children dehumanized and turned to rubble, becoming the true angels in our collective memory.
