Panel: Entangled Histories 

Panel: Entangled Histories 

Participants: Hrvoslava Brkušić, Theo Panagopoulos, Sanaz Sohrabi, Žiga Smolič

Moderator: Sima Kokotović

Žiga Smolič is a historian specializing in the contemporary history of the Middle East and Yugoslavia’s foreign policy during the Cold War. In 2025, he received his PhD from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana with a dissertation titled Yugoslavia and the Middle East, 1961–1980. His research focuses on the political, diplomatic, and social relations between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, with particular emphasis on the Palestinian revolution and relations with Egypt and Iraq. He is currently employed as a researcher at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, educator and researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explores themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and resistance. His most recent film is a documentary essay called “The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing” won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the Best Short Film at IDFA as well as being nominated for a BAFTA award in 2025 and a European Film Award in 2026 and he has just recently completed a PhD at the University of West of Scotland which explores anti-colonial methodologies, film and performance as counternarrative to recently digitised film archives of 1930s Palestine.

Hrvoslava Brkušić graduated in film and TV editing from the Academy of Dramatic Arts and received her master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of New Media. She has an extensive body of work as a film editor, with films screened at festivals such as Rotterdam, IDFA Amsterdam, CPH DOX, Sarajevo, 25 FPS, Oberhausen, and many others. In her artistic practice, she expresses herself in various media – sound installations, live performances, film, and video. She serves as a lecturer at the School of Documentary Film at Restart and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.

Sanaz Sohrabi is an artist-filmmaker and an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She recently completed a trilogy of essay films about the visual histories of resource sovereignty and post-colonial ecologies from the Global South.