FIFDH: Voices of Belleville

Shaped by Soraya’s mobile-phone recordings, this intimate documentary follows a sixteen-year-old Afghan artist over five years as she attempts to flee Iran to join her mother in Austria. Blending handheld video, animation, drawings and sculpture, the film maps a journey of escape, song and improvised dance. It examines courage, gendered violence and the creative impulse as survival, rendered in raw textures and lyrical fragments. The result is a porous, sensory portrait of resistance and artistic self-creation.

In Persian/Dari/Turkish (original version), with French subtitles.

Screening followed by a discussion with filmmakers Mehrdad Oskouei & Soraya Akhlaghi.

Arjun Talwar turns his camera toward Wilcza Street in Warsaw, filming neighbours and the textures of everyday life to probe his sense of belonging. Working with a quietly observant, intimate cinema, he assembles encounters and portraits that complicate simple narratives about contemporary Poland. The film unfolds as a patient, tactile study of otherness, community and political atmosphere—close-ups of faces and streetscapes that reveal nuance beneath stereotypes. Sparse, compassionate and perceptive, it listens to ordinary lives to rethink what home can mean.