In the Wake TV Producers Shayna and Julia discuss filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos's award-winning short film, a profound meditation on how personal grief transforms into collective mourning—and how images themselves can be both testimony and violence.
Reclaiming History Through Wildflowers: Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos, based in Scotland, uses archival 16mm footage of Palestinian wildflowers shot by a Scottish missionary in the 1930s and 1940s to explore colonialism, displacement, and the reclaiming of stolen histories. The film asks: Who gets to document a land? Whose gaze is preserved in archives? And how do we reclaim images that were never meant for us, transforming them from tools of colonial documentation into acts of resistance and remembrance?
Why This Matters: The film's exploration of individual versus collective grief speaks directly to the Palestinian experience—personal loss compounded by generations of dispossession, erasure, and ongoing violence. By repurposing colonial archival footage, Panagopoulos confronts how images can simultaneously bear witness and perpetuate harm. Winner of the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2025 and Best Short Film at IDFA 2024, this work demonstrates the power of experimental documentary to honor what has been lost while refusing to let history be written solely by colonizers.
Watch the full conversation as Shayna and Julia unpack the film's emotional and political layers, the transition from personal to collective grief, and why reclaiming archival images is an act of decolonization.
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