Mano Khalil

Mano Khalil is a Kurdish-Swiss film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Syrian Kurdistan, he has lived in Switzerland since 1996. In 2012 he founded the production company Frame Film in Bern.

From 1981 to 1986 he studied law and history at Damascus University. He then trained in fiction film directing from 1987 to 1994 at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU) in Bratislava, in former Czechoslovakia. Until 1995 he worked as a freelance director for Czechoslovak and later Slovak Television.

For more than 25 years Mano Khalil has made feature films and documentaries in Switzerland, many of them co-produced with Swiss Radio and Television SRF and ARTE. His feature film Neighbours (2021) has won more than 100 awards worldwide, among them the Bern Film Prize and the Best Script Award of the Red Sea International Film Festival. His documentary The Beekeeper (2013) received the Prix de Soleure at the Solothurn Film Festival.

His films centre on people between cultures: flight, home, memory and living together in a foreign place. He tells social and political stories through the eyes of his protagonists, without clichés or slogans.