Young Critics review: hold on to her

Review by Emily Jisoo Bowles

hold on to her is a lowercase film, both in title and tone. It’s ripe with silence, an acknowledgement that words can only do so much. Staged as a collective hearing made up of documented and undocumented activists in Brussels, artist 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.

On the 17th of May 2018, two-year old Mawda Shawri was murdered by a Belgian police officer who shot at the van she was riding in with her parents and other undocumented people near the Belgium-France border. The murder is recounted via polyphonic voiceover in multiple languages by the various activists, spoken over the backdrop of 8mm and 16mm footage of the highway where she was killed. The roads are skewed and slanted, seen through aerial and upside-down shots, the camera sometimes static and sometimes moving. The multiple angles speak to the polysemic and fragmented nature of reconstructing the event, a dialogue that keeps evolving like the road in a state of continuous flux. Landscapes are ambiguous places, containing histories that can’t be seen with merely the eye. In the repetition of its image, the highway becomes a topography of potential that holds us in its grainy multitudes.

The film is participatory and collaborative in form and process, not fitting neatly into the film festival specifications of a single director taking credit for a single piece of work. It exists as part of wider movement opposing dehumanising anti-migration laws, encompassing artist initiatives such as Comité Mawda Justice et Vérité and #Justice4Mawda. The collectivism of the choral voiceover rejects the hypervisibility of talking head interviews, never revealing who is behind each disembodied voice. Through this assemblage of heterogeneity, an infrastructure of care and solidarity begins to emerge, one that provides an alternative to the apathy of institutional justice. At points, the voices come together in a harmonised ensemble of humming, a rousing and mournful invocation that undulates through the body; we feel the collective pain but also the potential of what we can build together.

While examining the factors underlying Mawda’s death from multiple perspectives, the rhythm of the speech is interrupted by regular pauses. These silences allow us to grieve with the participants and reflect, as moments of suspension that make us sit in the absence and look and listen for what isn’t shown or said. If we can only speak in a language that we know, then perhaps the opposite is also true. One of the activists at the hearing suggests a thought exercise: what if we erase the words “migrant” and “refugee” from our vocabulary? In the unlearning of the hegemonic rhetoric surrounding migration, we can begin to disassemble the current discourse to let the new emerge.

In the same vein, the film enacts a collective excavation of the official narrative of Mawda’s death, meticulously detailing the lies of the police, who claimed that she “fell out the window” or that the other people in the van “threw her outside”. These falsities were then parroted by the media, cementing them into the public consciousness. hold on to her refuses to platform any sensationalist depictions of the incident, renouncing the numbing normalisation of state violence.

The film forces us to be an active participant in its quiet interrogation of injustice. It’s not interested in naming us as complicit, rather it wants us to join its cause. Instead of abstraction, it offers us concrete glimmers of resistance in the form of the Iraqi-Kurdish community coming together to block the highway in protest, or JUSTICE POUR MAWDA graffitied onto a wall.

hold on to her’s diligent formalism communicates its thorny complexities with seething eloquence. It’s less a reminder than a call to action: we need to hold on to each other, and to our rage that keeps us going.