The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing + Return to Haifa

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing by Theo Panagopoulos (2024, UK, 17 minutes)

When a Palestinian filmmaker living in Scotland discovers a rarely shown Scottish film archive documenting Palestinian wildflowers, he decides to recover the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of the image as a tool of both witness and violence, revealing the complex relationship between people and the earth. • Festivals and awards: IDFA (Best Short Film), BAFTA (Best British Short Film nomination), European Film Awards (European Short Film nomination), Sundance FF (Short Film Grand Jury Prize), Edinburgh IFF, Slamdance FF, London Short FF, Ghent IFF, Go Short (Best European Short Documentary)

“Return to Haifa” /"Return to Haifa” directed by Kassem Hawal (1982, Lebanon, 77 min.) /Polish premiere

A moving drama based on Ghassan Kanafani's novel of the same name, which takes place in 1967, almost two decades after the Nakba. Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple displaced from Haifa in 1948, visit their former home. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a citizen of Israel, who lives there, lets them in. She and her husband took up residence there shortly after the Palestinian couple were evicted. The heroes return to Haifa in the hope of learning something about their son Khaldun, whom they left at home one April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them will be able to return there anymore. They soon discover that the abandoned infant was adopted by Miriam and her husband, who gave him his Hebrew name — Dov. Today, the young man is a soldier of the Israeli army. Their meeting confronts all three with a painful, shared history, raising questions about loss, displacement, identity and responsibility, and revealing the enduring, human consequences of the Nakba. • Festivals and awards: London Palestine FF, Festival Ciné-Palestine, Arabiske Filmdager