Hala Alabdalla’s work brings together documentary filmmaking and multimedia installation. She grew up in the 1970s during the years of the Damascus Ciné-Club, and it was there that she met Omar Amiralay (1944–2011) and Mohammad Malas (1945–). The three became friends and formed a collective of filmmakers as well as the production platform Ramad Films, of which H. Alabdalla would later become director.

A political activist, H. Alabdalla was first arrested at the age of twenty, and spent fourteen months in prison under the obscurantist regime of Hafez Al Assad, who specifically imprisoned intellectuals and filmmakers. Following a second period of detention, she was released in the early 1980s along with her partner, the Syrian artist Youssef Abdelké (1951–). From 1981, the two lived in exile in Paris. There, H. Alabdalla studied the anthropology of the Arab World at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and cinema at Université Paris VIII.

I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave (2006) was her revelatory work: selected for and winning an award at the Venice International Film Festival, it is an existential epic told through the destinies, dreams and disappointments of Syrian women. In a revolution of the discourse, it foresaw the hopes that would be unearthed by the Syrian revolution that started in 2011. Hey! Don’t Forget the Cumin (2008) represented a continuation of this line of thought, dealing with exile, madness and death through the tragic stories of three artists.

The film-investigation As If We Were Catching a Cobra (2012) was created between Syria and Egypt, out of exchanges with different caricaturists who had mobilised during the social movements and uprisings of 2011. H. Alabdalla seeks to understand their modes of expression, their margins of manoeuvre under censorship and all that their art, a worthy balancing act, articulates about Arab civil societies.

Farouk, Besieged Like Me (2016) is an atypical portrait of Syrian publisher Farouk Mardam-Bey, who has dedicated his life to championing contemporary Arab poetry and thought. This series of portraits also includes Omar Amiralay: Sorrow, Time, Silence (2021), which traces the commitment of a filmmaker, and Dance Against the Wolves (2021), about a young artist who continues his life in France at the École des beaux-arts de Bourges after years in prison in Syria.

H. Alabdalla’s films combine accounts of exile and activist testimony, the poetics of time and space, nostalgia and emergency. In them, the struggle for cinematographic freedom is fought for the benefit of individual liberties.

The artist’s latest multimedia installation Mon exil, ton exil, notre exil [My exile, your exile, our exile], displayed at Paris’ Musée d’Art Moderne in 2024, is composed of fragments of the film I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave, which in turn reconstructs autobiographical memories, accompanied by love letters exchanged while H. Alabdalla and Y. Abdelké were in prison, written on tiny cigarette papers and hidden in miniature sculptures made of bread dough.

H. Alabdalla works to safeguard and promote Syrian cinema, helping other directors to create and circulate films using the platform of festivals in which she participates, curating programmes, giving talks and acting as an intermediary. Her films and installations have been shown in museums including MoMA in New York and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as well as at international festivals.