Competition

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

Theo Panagopoulos

Country

UK (Scotland)

Year

2024

Length

17'01"

Category

Documentary

Screenplay

Theo Panagopoulos (with Erica Monde as consultant)

Editing

Theo Panagopoulos

Music

Alexandra Katerinopoulou

Sound

Hannan Jones

Production

Marissa Keating

Distribution

Scottish Documentary Institute

Synopsis

When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender essay film questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and land.

Biography

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His work explores themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identity and language in an equally sensitive and political way.

Statement

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing began in the summer of 2023 as an accidental encounter with film archives showing Palestinian flowers of the 1930s & 1940s. The footage, sitting undigitised and unseen for decades, was located just a 10 minute walk from my current home in Glasgow. The archives present a world that my Palestinian grandparents knew very well, a world that is now actively being erased through current narratives, imagery and violence. My film reclaims the footage as a form of testimony in a heightened and uncertain time, and as a form of resistance to cultural erasure.

— Theo Panagopoulos

Archival materials

National Library of Scotland

Screenings

Sat 27.09.202518:00–20:00