Mohamad Hafeda
Directing
Biography
Mohamad Hafeda is an artist, filmmaker, and academic whose work explores themes of borders, displacement, and spatial justice through participatory and site-specific practices. He is Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and co-founder of Febrik, a collaborative platform working with underrepresented communities in contexts of migration and refuge. Hafeda’s filmmaking is part of a broader spatial practice that uses media as a method for producing knowledge on displacement and resettlement. His films include "Sewing Borders" (2018), "The Time While Waiting" (2022), and "The Interpreter" (2025), exploring themes of temporality, voice, and the bureaucracies of refuge. His projetcs have been featured internationally in exhibitions and residencies including the Serpentine Galleries, South London Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, and Beirut Art Center. Hafeda is the author of "Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut" (2019), and co-author of "Creative Refuge" (2014) and "Action of Street / Action of Room" (2016). He is also co-editor of "Narrating Beirut from its Borderlines" (2011) and "Border Fictions" (forthcoming). In 2021, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Visual and Performing Arts for his contribution to socially engaged participatory art.
Known For
The Interpreter follows Amjad, a Syrian refugee in the UK, as he retrains to become a community interpreter, returning to the very system that once interrogated him. Revisiting his own asylum interviews, Amjad navigates the charged dynamics between interpreter, displaced and authority. Through staged re-enactments, the film interrogates the ethics of neutrality and the interpreter’s role as both voice and barrier, where translation becomes an act of subversion and connection.
The Interpreter
How are borders constructed and how do they impact people's lives? Through personal tales of displacement, Beirut residents adapt different maps of the city and region by sewing borders onto them. Archival maps, international treaties and declarations evoke a complex scheme of power structures and nation-building.