Shorts: Ghosts of the Past
Ghosts of the Past brings together four short films from three continents, each looking back at personal experiences often intertwined with broader political realities. From a woman confronting the abuse inflicted by those who were meant to protect her, to a sister reckoning with the childhood loss of her brother; from a mother remembering her son, one of many victims of racial violence in Brazil, to the story of a woman, a friend, and a protester facing the consequences of resisting an oppressive state.
These films reveal how private grief, memory, and resilience become part of a larger historical fabric. They remind us that history is not only a sequence of events, but a constellation of personal stories, where the political becomes deeply human.
In this combined programme
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To the Woods
Agnès Patron
Sister remembers that Brother had dark eyes, hair like her own, shoulders as fragile as a bird’s wings, and that he knew the way to the river by heart. Sister has forgotten nothing about Brother.
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Rio Remains Beautiful
Felipe Casanova
Within the revelry of Rio’s Carnival, Ilma writes to her son. How does she sense his presence in the crowd? Suspended in time, the celebration becomes a space of memory and political resistance.
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Rahhala: Hayya ala Hayya
Lujain Jo
Set against ethereal visuals from the natural world, snippets of text stitch together memories of domestic abuse inflicted upon a set of sisters over a period of more than a decade. Seen through the eyes of one sister, the project takes viewers behind the closed doors of an unsafe home, as she flashes through a lifetim...
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As I Lay Dying
Pegah Ahangarani, Mohammadreza Farzad
“There were so many of us, but when it all ended, each of us went our own way.” We see footage of the Green Movement, a wave of protests in Iran that began in the summer of 2009, in response to the presidential election fraud in favor of the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We see the chaos, the solidarity amo...