THE FLOWERS STAND SILENTLY, WITNESSING

Synopsis

When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers, 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.

Statement of the director

THE FLOWERS STAND SILENTLY, WITNESSING began in the summer of 2023 as an accidental encounter with film archives showing Palestinian flowers of the 1930s and 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.

Selected at

Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen