Of Fathers and Sons 2017
Previous FilmsAfter his Sundance award-winning documentary RETURN TO HOMS, Talal Derki returned to his homeland where he gained the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses primarily on the children, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up with a father whose only dream is to establish an Islamic caliphate. Osama (13) and his brother Ayman (12) both love and admire their father and obey his words, but while Osama seems content to follow the path of Jihad, Ayman wants to go back to school. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, OF FATHERS AND SONS is a work of unparalleled intimacy that captures the chilling moment when childhood dies and jihadism is born.
The Filmmakers
Talal Derki, Director
Talal Derki was born in Damascus and is based in Berlin since 2014. He studied film directing in Athens and worked as an assistant director for many feature film productions and was a director for different Arab TV programs between 2009 and 2011. Furthermore, he worked as a freelance cameraman for CNN and Thomson & Reuters. Talal Derkis short films and feature length documentaries received many awards at a variety of festivals. His feature documentary RETURN TO HOMS has won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in 2014. The same year, he was also a member of the international Jury at IDFA.
Tobias Siebert, Producer
After graduation in North Carolina and Munich and a career as film editor, Tobias N. Siebert studied production and media economics at the University for Television and Film Munich. Today he is partner and general manager at BASIS BERLIN, an independent production company and one of the leading post-production houses in Germany. He focuses on the development of high-quality international arthouse fiction, feature documentaries and serial documentary formats, always looking for stories which can touch the audience. His production The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Documentary. Recent films include Of Fathers and Sons by Talal Derki (Winner Sundance 2018) and Taste of Cement by Ziad Kalthoum for which he was nominated for the German Film Prize.
Tobias N. Siebert is a member of the German Film Academy, the German Producers Association and a Sundance DFP, Documentary Campus and EAVE Alumni. He is also a member of the Asia Pacific Screen Academy and has been twice-nominated for an APSA as producer of Taste of Cement and Of Fathers and Sons.