The long shadow of war and colonialism is a ghost, haunting our homelands and never letting us forget (even if we wanted to).

The ongoing genocides in Palestine and Sudan are ghosts, phantoms that hovers over every moment of our lives without respite. But ghosts are also the memories of our ancestors and the continuous presence of our cultures. They can guide us, and teach us how to survive, remain steadfast, and resist. They can comfort us with a warm embrace and, despite our fears, remind us we are not alone. The GHOSTS strand explores the creative treatment of this duality, somehow perfectly suited to filmmaking because the cinematic image is, itself, a ghost; the spectral remnants of a moment lost to time.

At the heart of this strand is a collective experience that ties the wild plants and flowers of Palestine to ancestral practices and histories. From Palestinian resistance, to the defence of our basic rights to protest and freedom of expression in Britain, making and sharing tea is an act of building new networks of solidarity and communal resilience.

Saeed Taji Farouky – SAFAR co-founder