Robin Vanbesien’s film hold on to her (2024) traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity and struggle that addresses a recent case of police and state violence in the context of migration border control in Belgium.

In 2018, two year-old Mawda Shawri, daughter of Phrast and Shamden and sister to Hama, was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a car chase on a central highway. In 2023, over 40 people, both undocumented and documented resident activists, assembled before the camera at La Voix des sans papiers in Brussels to stage a collective hearing of documents from and reactions to Mawda’s case. Together they produce the counter-forensic evidence of this deadly Channel crossing.

Robin Vanbesien is a Brussels-based artist, filmmaker, researcher, and educator. He explores how cinematic methods align with and contribute to situated struggles of place-making. How can cinema—with or without a lens or a screen—offer ways to acknowledge, reclaim, reassemble, rehearse, and redistribute the social collective body and the sensory imagination of such struggles? How do we create a cinema that arises from the reassembly and recreation with assemblers who speak and act in close proximity to these situated struggles of place-making? And how can we contribute to the ongoing redistribution of this kind of cinema?

The conversation with Robin Vanbesien is a part of the discursive program Remember Freedom: Poetry and Borders.

The program is supported by:
Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb
Kultura Nova Foundation
Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)