Grenn Mawon
Luminous untamed witnesses
Film screening and conversation with film maker Deniz Şimşek, and Nadjet Hamdi, representative of the Polisario Front.
17. May 2025
19.30-22.00
19.30-22.00
Save the Date
For free
all ages welcome
multilingual
How do landscapes bear witness to what history tries to erase? How do both human and more-than-human remember and endure colonial violence? And how can cinema excavate the fragments of these memories? Wind, light, flowers, and mountains are the protagonists in four films spanning Western Sahara, Uzbekistan, Palestine, and Kurdistan, where myth, ritual, and archival fragments intertwine to reclaim histories at the risk of erasure.
This event is part of the film series The Land is Whispering: Imagine Otherwise!. You can find the whole program here: The Land is Whispering - Program.
The Flowers Stand, Silently Witnessing
(Theo Panagopoulos, United Kingdom, 2024, 17 min, Original version with English subtitles)
The movie reclaims archival footage of Palestinian wildflowers, captured by Scottish missionaries in British-occupied Palestine during the 1930s and 40s. Discovered as unprocessed films at the National Library of Scotland, the film becomes a personal meditation on Panagopoulos’s Palestinian roots, while raising vital questions about the role of image-making as both a tool of testimony and violence.
Detours While Speaking of Monsters
(Deniz Şimşek, Turkey/Kurdistan, 2024, 18 min, Original version with English subtitles)
Listening to the mountains as they murmur stories of loss and silence. In the depths of Lake Van, an ancient creature lingers—a specter of history, a presence both real and imagined. Here, myth and memory entwine, the monstrous standing in for all that has been erased, yet refuses to be forgotten.
Galb’Echaouf
(Abdessamad El Montassir, Western Sahara, 2021, 21 min, Original version with English subtitles)
Galb’Echaouf follows the wind as it moves through the desert, carrying voices that refuse to fade. The landscape bears the weight of colonial plunder, its vastness marked by absence, its silence heavy with remembrance. In this expanse, resilience endures—in breath, in song, in the land itself, which holds traces of the past just beneath its surface.
In 18,000 Worlds
(Saodat Ismailova, Uzbekistan, 2023, 31 min, Original version with English subtitles)
Myth, ritual, and archival fragments intertwine to reflect on histories at risk of erasure. Inspired by Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi’s Sufi cosmology, the film envisions multiple realms of existence—a universe where knowledge is luminous, and unseen worlds remain within reach. Like Suhrawardi’s allegories of divine light and exile, 18,000 Worlds conjures a space where history and mysticism intertwine, offering a cinematic talisman of resistance and remembrance.
