HOLD ON TO HER
Robin Vanbesien | Belgium 2024 | 80 min. | Kurdish, Netherlands, France, English with engl. subtitles
SATURDAY, 10.05. | 7:30 pm
De France, Saal 1 | TICKETS
Austrian premiere
In presence of Robin Vanbesien
In 2018, Mawda Shawri, Hama’s sister and Phrast and Shamden’s daughter, was two years old when she was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a border control check. Five years after the violent act, more than 40 activists assemble before the camera at the offices of the organisation La Voix des Sans Papiers in Brussels and stage a collective reading. In words of mourning and warning, they read the protocols and records of the incident and recount memories and reactions.
In HOLD ON TO HER, Robin Vanbesien creates an urgent poetry that traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity, and the struggle for legal equality and counters police impunity and the lack of state accountability.
Director: Robin Vanbesien
Camera: Diren Agbaba
Editing: Robin Vanbesien
Sound: Boris Debackere
Production: Steven Dhoedt, Robin Vanbesien
presented by
AWARDS & SCREENINGS
Berlin IFF – Forum Expanded
Lemesos IDFF (Cyprus)
St. Moritz Art FF
Gent IFF – National premiere
ExGround Wiesbaden
Kasseler Dok Fest
Ethnofest Athens
Rome IDFF (Best Sound Award)
Zagreb HRFF
Festival En Ville
BIOGRAPHY
A visual artist, PhD candidate and filmmaker, Robin Vanbesien (1979) explores modes of embodied knowledge and collective imagination engaged in social and political struggles. He collaborates with situated emancipatory grassroots movements, exploring cinema as a space for social gathering and political engagement.
