The Flowers Stand Silently Witnessing, 2024 - Film, 17 minutes 

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Greek-Palestinian filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos’s quiet, intensely powerful film uses historic footage he stumbled across by chance in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive. The original footage, showing wildflowers in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, was shot by and mostly features Scottish missionary settlers, and is thought to include some of the earliest existing colour footage filmed in the region. Panagopoulos’s decision to re-edit this precious material was an act of cultural reclamation which allowed him to reframe the viewer’s perspective and to draw parallels between the Scottish settlers, the Palestinian population and the connection of both groups to the flowers. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of testimony when linked to entanglements between people and the land.

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The Flowers Stand Silently Witnessing is currently exhibiting as part of the SOIL: The World At Out Feet, Somerset House, and won best short film at IDFA and was nominated for a BAFTA

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“There were things that hit me quite hard, especially in a time of grief as well, where you see something so beautiful, but also you’re grieving the present. There is that tension of that beauty and that violence that is constantly within the same frame. That was the process of discovering the language of the film, of something that feels so beautiful, but also so melancholic because you know what happens later. That sense of knowing, because of our present, gives the film a lot more meaning that you wouldn’t have at that time.” - Theo Panagopoulos

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