A Palestinian filmmaker uncovers a rare visual archive created by a Scottish traveler who photographed wildflowers in Palestine during the British Mandate. Reworked into a contemplative documentary, the film reflects on loss and absence through a reckoning with the colonial conditions under which the footage itself was produced.
By probing the relationship between what is made visible and what is obscured, the film foregrounds how moving images can serve both as witnesses to violence and as part of its machinery.
The film is in both Arabic and English.
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Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, film programmer, educator and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explore themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and resistance often through anti-colonial, participatory and archival methodologies. His most recent film is a documentary essay called “The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing”, has screened in more than 150 festivals worldwide. It has won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2025, the Best Short Film at IDFA in 2024, was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2025, has been nominated as a short film candidate for the European Film Academy 2026 as well as winning major awards in festivals such as Go Short, London Short Film Festival, Braziers, Salem, Interaction and others. It was also screened as part of SOIL exhibition at Somerset House, London between January and April 2025.
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Projects at the Lab: The Cinematheque | All That We Witness launched this December and continues into January with a series of encounters that look closely at contemporary directions in Arab documentary practice. The program turns to works that approach wider realities through the immediacy of lived experience; following how personal perspectives surface within, complicate, or cast new light on collective events. In doing so, it reopens the question of what the documentary form can offer today: how it examines the past, and how it engages the pressures and urgencies of the present moment.
The program brings together conversations, public discussions, and a workshop, alongside a film-screening series.