Advanced Research Centre

ARC Public
Date: Friday 17 October 2025
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Venue: University of Glasgow, Advanced Research Centre, 11 Chapel Lane
Category: Films and theatre

Join us for the third event in the CinemARC: Borderzone series. The Act of Witnessing examines the relationship between bodies, the environment, and the framing of identities in the context of war. It explores ways that colonial violence shapes identity through what is revealed, and omitted, highlighting the silenced and excluded, and echoing Judith Butler’s question of "who counts as a who."

The event reimagines the archive to reflect on both physical and metaphorical borders and their impact on individuals and communities. A selection of short films by international artists will prompt dialogue around these themes. This screening will include the Sundance Award Winning film by Scottish filmmaker Theo Panagopolous, The Flowers Stand Silently Witnessing.

In companion to the films, we will be joined by a panel of speakers to discuss the historical and contemporary filmic contexts of global border zones and the significance of borders in imagined and physical space.

Borderzone explores the concept of borders, both physical and metaphorical. It features short films from international artists with the aim to provoke conversations about themes around the impact of borders on individuals and communities.

 

Schedule

18:00 - Welcome and arrival drinks

18:15 - Introduction to event

18:20 - 19:15 - Films

19:15 - 20:00 - Panel discussion and Q&A

 

Films

Bloodline | Wojciech Węglarz | 2024 | 12 minutes

In the oldest forest in Europe, the border between Poland and Belarus is marked by a large fence. Its purpose is to make it harder for refugees to enter the European Union. But what kind of collateral damage does it cause? The short film Bloodline chooses a clever, thought-provoking perspective, focusing not on humans, but on a bison.

Man Number 4 | Miranda Pennell | 2024 | 10 minutes

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker. Pennell does something truly remarkable in her essay: in the midst of the world’s first livestreamed genocide and its relentless flow of imagery, she creates space for a minute analysis focused on detail.

Army photographer captures her own death | Kirsten Adkins | 2020 | 4 minutes

A military photographer was killed alongside four of her Afghan colleagues during a bomb disposal training exercise in 2013. The image and caption describing ‘the moment of her death’ was released two years later by the US military. The films images operate according to an aesthetic interplay between process colours, cyan, magenta and yellow, reminiscent of summer days, and slow-motion cinematic explosions. The image does not behave according to its descriptive caption.

Men of My Dreams | Gelare Khoshgozaran | 2020 | 10 minutes

A reflection on the artist’s exile, the film unfolds a series of vignettes that toy with the unstable ground between dream and reality. Seeking the idea of ‘home’ in the lineage of antifascist thought and poetry the film connects Los Angeles to the artist’s intellectual, political and affective spaces of belonging.

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing | Theo Pangopoulous | 2024 | 15 minutes

When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.

 

Panelists

Kirsten Adkins

Kirsten Adkins is an artist and filmmaker who has a professional background in documentary television. Kirsten’s filmmaking and writing practice is concerned with stories of home, belonging and migration. She is currently working on a forthcoming edited anthology (Routledge 2024), and curated project space that is concerned with ways that artists and filmmakers use hybrid practices in film, poetry, song and dance to provoke questions on place, identity and belonging.

Emily Munro

Emily Munro is a curator of moving image at the National Library of Scotland, a filmmaker and a writer. Her creative archive documentary Living Proof: A Climate Story (2021) looks at our energy history and complicity with the climate crisis. It has screened widely in Scotland and abroad. Her recent film project, Childish (2024), draws on horror tropes and Scotland’s film collection to explore the choreography of childhood and children’s autonomy under the adult gaze.

Theo Panagopoulos

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, film programmer, educator and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explore themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and resistance often through anti-colonial, participatory and archival methodologies.

 

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This event is free, but ticketed.

You are welcome to one drink on arrival, while stocks last.

If you have any access requirements, please contact ARCEngage@Glasgow.ac.uk.

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