Anorak, Berlin |  May 8, 2025 |  20:00
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We are happy to announce the film screening and talk as part of our programming in the lead-up to the September festival hosted by Anorak.
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In a world increasingly defined by rising fascism, state violence, displacement, and the erosion of basic human rights, how do we make sense of the senseless? This short film program, part of Hive International Short Film Days’ year-round series, explores madness not as individual pathology but as a critical lens to confront the chaos of our times.
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This program presents Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy, where speculative aesthetics and fractured narratives reflect the conditions of exile, erasure, and colonial violence. Increasingly, Palestinian artists turn to science fiction to confront what Hanan El Shakry calls “the forces of cultural, historical, and territorial erasure.” Here, sci-fi offers a means of historicizing the present - what Fredric Jameson saw as imagining the present as the past of a future society. This defamiliarization creates critical distance, making the now appear strange - and possibly changeable.
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Madness, in this context, becomes both metaphor and method: a response to the implosion of reality and a way of seeing that defies imposed coherence.
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Following the screening, we will be joined by pluridisciplinary artist and researcher Alexandra Sophia Handal for a conversation, moderated by film scholar Şirin Fulya Erensoy. Handal’s decolonial feminist practice, spanning film, painting and writing, excavates transgenerational colonial and migration traumas, with a particular focus on Palestine and the wider Global South. Her work delves into the lived and inherited histories of the dispossessed through embodied, archival, and emancipatory modes of storytelling.

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