The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

Theo Panagopoulos (who has a Greek father, a Lebanese-born mother and Palestinian grandparents) lives and works in Scotland, where he discovered two silent 16mm color films made in the 1930s and 1940s by a Scottish missionary who had decided to film the floral splendor of the Holy Land.

In Panagopoulos’ montage of this bucolic archive footage, he gradually zooms in on the Arab Palestinians who appear in the background. The result is an elegiac essay on the role of historical footage, over which the dark shadow of contemporary horrors inevitably looms.