Still from UNDR
Activating Archives: Reclaiming Colonial Images
screening of two films + Q&A with Diana Allan and Theo Panagopoulos | total Running time: 76m | book ticketsThis programme brings together two films that reclaim archival images from the colonial gaze, transforming records of domination into sites of resistance, memory, and political intervention. By revisiting and reworking historical footage, the programme asks how archives can be activated to contest official histories and recover what colonial image-making sought to erase.
Still from UNDR
UNDR
The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
Director: Kamal Aljafari
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2015
Original language: no dialogue
place of production: Palestine, germany
AGE rating: 18+
Still from Partition
Partition
Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told. Recovering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, unraveling colonial pasts through soundscapes of the precarious present, Partition is a meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget.
director: Diana Allan
YEAR of release: 2025
Original Language: arabic (English subtitles)
Place of production: Palestine, Lebanon, Canada
Age rating: 18+The Q&A will be moderated by Hana Sleiman
Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Palestinian filmmaker and educator based in Glasgow. His creative and academic work investigates collective memory, displacement and resistance often through anti-colonial, participatory, and archival methodologies. He recently completed a PhD at the University of the West of Scotland exploring Scottish archives of 1930s Palestine.
Hana Sleiman is a historian and archives practitioner. Her work explores processes of archive making and history writing in the context of the Palestinian liberation and social movements in Lebanon and the diaspora. She is a Lecturer of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Edinburgh.
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