Malmö arab film festival—concept proposal
Visual Identity, 2022
MAFF is an independent Arab film festival held annually in Malmö, Sweden. The brief called for a visual identity that could hold two cultures simultaneously, without flattening either into a symbol of the other.
The design departs from a single conceptual premise: that the festival itself is an act of collision: Arab cinematic culture merging in a Nordic environment. The visual language had to perform that same tension.
The color system takes the most legible signifiers of both contexts, Swedish blue and yellow, the warm ochres and dusty peaches of vintage Arab graphic design, and blend them at the point of contact, producing something that belongs fully to neither. The gradient is not a background choice. It is the concept made visible.
The typographic system runs Arabic and Latin scripts in parallel, each in its own rhythm, without forcing visual reconciliation between them. The bilingual coexistence is treated as a condition, not a problem to be solved.
The arch motif operates across registers simultaneously: architectural reference, cinematic frame, cultural marker. The starburst carries the warmth and optimism of 1950s and 60s pan-Arab poster design, a visual era that held a particular cultural confidence and translated into a contemporary graphic vocabulary.
Photography is drawn from the films themselves and from the festival audience: people in the dark, watching. The identity is grounded in the human experience of cinema rather than its spectacle.