hold on to her
Mawda Shawri, two years old in 2018, sister of Hama, daughter of Phrast and Shamden, was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a migration border control on a Belgian central highway. In 2023, over 40 people, both undocumented and documented resident activists, assembled before the camera at La Voix des sans papiers in Brussels to stage a collective hearing of documents from and reactions to Mawda’s case. In this collective hearing session, the speakers acknowledge a ghostly haunting caused by police impunity and the state’s lack of accountability. It is in their refusal of such a shortage of truth and human rights that they feel the need to explore beyond the official narratives. Together they produce the counter-forensic evidence of Mawda’s deadly Channel crossing.
This collective hearing is supported by Vanbesien's audiovisual grammar, which foregrounds the opaque and the poetic. Given the inability to proceed within the dominant frameworks and the urge to imagine other possible worlds, this collective hearing challenges what is visible and audible. The film moves back and forth between the hearing and the site of the crime. This dialogue is imaginary: the collective inner world of the collective hearing is projected onto a landscape, which is at once haunting and mournful.
Robin Vanbesien
As a visual artist and filmmaker, Robin Vanbesien explores modes of embodied knowledge and collective imagination engaged in social and political struggles. Through the notion of ciné place-making, he acknowledges the capacity of cinema to preserve, reclaim, or redistribute invisibilized memories, histories, and lived cultures, using a cinematic language that probes beyond the prevalent scenes of representation. He collaborates with situated emancipatory grassroots movements, exploring cinema as a space for social gathering and political engagement that rehearses the capacity to hold space collectively. In 2020, Vanbesien co-founded The Post Film Collective, which explores cinema as a form of speculative rehearsal and communal assembly. 'Under These Words (Solidarity Athens 2016)' (2017) and 'the wasp and the weather' (2019) premiered at transmediale and Cinéma du Réel. His first feature ‘hold on to her’ will world premiere at Berlinale Forum Expanded (2024).
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