Philip Rizk is a filmmaker and writer based in Cairo, Egypt. His feature film Out on the Street directed with Jasmina Metwaly premiered at the Berlinale in 2015. Rizk is currently working on a fictional travel film placed in post-Ottoman Greater Syria. He is a member of the Mosireen video collective.
According to the thesis of the curator Adania Shibli, railways and their rail networks do not just constitute infrastructures, they also narrate histories of colonialism and its consequences. The curator invited Philip Rizk to write a piece about his journey from Berlin to the border of Syria, which the writer and filmmaker began in the summer of 2017. In his text Rizk explores the figure of the anarchist Alexander Berkman (1870-1936) who during his lifetime played an important role in the resistance against US and Russian imperialism, and, traveled on the tracks of the Baghdad Railway 100 years ago. To article...
