During this year’s edition of Hive International Short Film Days, we will host a panel titled, with the participation of film scholar and filmmaker Viola Shafik and filmmaker Basma Al-Sharif and in conversation with film and media scholar Şirin Fulya Erensoy. In line with this year’s festival theme of reaction, the panel will explore how we maintain our voices amidst the ongoing failures of humanity and how, as filmmakers and scholars, we respond to the horrors of our time while finding hope, even when history seems hopelessly to repeat itself. What strategies can we adopt to create not only images of resistance that inspire political action and shift public opinion, but also to challenge the structures that uphold representational hierarchies and biases within film production and academic work? How do we confront the deliberate repression and censorship of certain knowledge systems in these fields and build a cultural resistance movement?
Viola Shafik is a German-Egyptian film theorist, curator, and filmmaker, who has written extensively on the history and culture of the so-called Arab world. Drawing on her recent book on documentary filmmaking in revolutionary contexts across Algeria, Morocco, Palestine and Syria, Shafik will discuss the complexities of documenting resistance and the ethical dilemmas faced by filmmakers capturing the realities of war and political upheaval. She will explore what it means to film and record such charged realities—how cinema can serve as both testimony and intervention, and the responsibility filmmakers bear when representing trauma, violence, and resistance.
As a Palestinian artist, Basma Al-Sharif's work examines the cyclical nature of political conflicts and seeks ways to produce images that not only reflect the consequences of colonization and occupation on a historical level but also incorporate the subjective experiences such histories have generated. She consciously bears witness to life itself, in an effort to represent Palestinian existence beyond the frames constructed by Western and Israeli media narratives that aim to erase, deny and obstruct the sight of such stories. Her contribution to the panel will focus on her approach to creating new visual languages to confront erasure and offer alternative representations of Palestinian life.

The randomness of our physical existence on this planet doesn't recognise any human-made borders. We do not choose where we are born, or what circumstances we will face. This selection explores the political implications of this randomness. It looks at how the circumstances we are born into can have a profound impact on our lives, and how the choices we make can have far-reaching consequences. It shows that we are all subject to the forces of politics and power. But it is also a reminder that we are not powerless even if the odds are stacked against us.