Leila Albayaty

Adopting the metaphor of a record’s hidden B-side, the film follows Leila—a singer, actress, and newly self-appointed filmmaker—as she embarks on her first feature “Berlin Telegram,” secretly directing and starring while journeying between Berlin and Paris. She collects lost footage and rewrites her own narrative, creating a poetic hybrid that blurs autobiography, fiction, and the process of remaking one’s story.

Leila is a singer-songwriter who lives in Brussels. When Antoine, the man she is in love with, suddenly walks out on her for another woman, she leaves for Berlin to start a new life.

When we’re moving, walking, watching, driving, how do we breathe? European Summer road diary. Back-and-forth with friends, music, Super8, video, poems. It’s an inner travelling hard to finish and give, because that kind of ‘catches’ doesn’t stop itself. As life is unrecordable, I play and replay reflections at many fps (frames per second - or second frames).

After losing part of her memory in an accident, Leila, a young French woman of Iraqi origin, reconstructs her story by reconnecting with her family and exploring her roots. Through music and cinema, she brings her exiled father's poems to lite, dis-covers the reality of the Middle East, and embarks on a personal quest to understand her identity and find her voice.