Watchmen

W-Features is Watchmen’s label for auteur-driven cinema. We develop, produce, and co-produce feature films and documentaries with international directors whose work – and often whose own lives – crosses borders. Our films keep circling the same questions: migration and exile, belonging and identity, the point where the personal and the political become inseparable. Made in Berlin, they look outward – to Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Brazil, the USA and Greece – for cinema audiences worldwide.

We commit to directors over the long term. Our work with Karim Aïnouz spans three films: FUTURO BEACH, a Brazil–Berlin love story in Competition at Berlinale 2014; NARDJES A., a portrait of a young activist in Algeria’s pro-democracy uprising (Berlinale Panorama 2020); and MARINER OF THE MOUNTAINS, his personal essay on his late father’s Algeria, at Cannes 2021. With Nancy Biniadaki, the relationship runs from her debut THE SURFACE OF THINGS (Athens 2017) to MAYSOON.

MY FAVOURITE CAKE by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha – a tender, defiant portrait of a seventy-year-old widow reclaiming her life in Tehran — premiered in Competition at Berlinale 2024, won the FIPRESCI Award, and earned a 100% critics’ score and five stars from The Guardian.

MAYSOON by Nancy Biniadaki – an Egyptian archaeologist in Berlin fighting to keep her family, her papers, and her freedom – won Sabrina Amali Best Actress at Filmfest Oldenburg and Thessaloniki.

That work is not the whole of it. We also develop series and films for broad audiences – comedy, contemporary drama, genre – for streaming and television as readily as for cinema. Current projects span auteur-driven films, our first animation feature, a comedy-drama series, and feature documentaries. The standard doesn’t change: we build every project around characters an audience can relate to.