Mawda Shawri, two years old in 2018, sister of Hama, daughter of Phrast and Shamden, was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a migration border control on a Belgian 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.

In this collective hearing, the speakers acknowledge a ghostly haunting caused by police impunity and the state's lack of accountability. In their rejection of such a lack of truth and human rights, they feel the need to explore beyond the official narratives. Together they are producing the forensic counter-evidence to Mawda's deadly Channel crossing.

This collective hearing is supported by Vanbesien's audiovisual grammar, which foregrounds the opaque and the poetic. Given the inability to proceed within the dominant frameworks and the urge to imagine other possible worlds, this collective hearing challenges what is visible and audible. The film moves back and forth between the collective hearing and the scene of the crime. This dialogue is imaginary: the inner world of the collective hearing is projected onto a landscape that is at once haunting and mournful.

-- Dir. Robin Vanbesien - 80min - 2024 - Belgium --

"insightful....sets itself an ambitious goal: to expose the hidden infrastructure of state coercion that supports European migration policy" - Guardian

"traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity and struggle, addressing a recent case of police and state violence in Belgium" - Berlinale

"an essay film which takes a modest yet plain-speaking and resolutely militant approach to question the fate we reserve for fellow human beings in our societies, which have a habit of closing ranks" - Cineuropa

"a beautiful work of art and absolutely heartbreaking" - Letterboxd

"“Robin Vanbesien’s film is more concerned with listening than speaking, holding space for absences where new possibilities beyond our oppressive realities can be imagined.” Photogenie