Panel: Collaborative Futures

Panel: Collaborative Futures

Participants: Hrvoslava Brkušić, Theo Panagopoulos, Sanaz Sohrabi, Žiga Smolič, Mariz Kelada, Ivana Perić, Emilija Vuković, Feodor Aleksov, Iskandar Abdalla

Moderators: Karla Crnčević, 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.

Mariz Kelada is researcher and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The American University of Beirut. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching combines production studies, media and urban anthropology, with a focus on labor, solidarity, political subjectivities and imaginations specially in Egypt and the Global South. She is also a potter and a Sci-Fi fan.

Iskandar Abdalla is an academic and curator from Egypt, Artistic Director of ALFILM – Arab Film Festival Berlin, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto.

Ivana Perić is a journalist working for the weekly newspaper Novosti. Member of the Nepokorena Palestina collective and the feminist collective fAKTIV.

Emilija Vuković is an Art History student in Belgrade who previously studied Fine Arts in France. She was active in the recent student protests in Serbia, notably the blockade of the Student Cultural Center.

Feodor Aleksov is currently studying film production at the “Faculty of Media and Communications” and working there as a Professor’s Assistant. He was active in the recent protests in Serbia, working mostly as a videographer and editor, making short documentaries of the student movement as part of the “B28” group. He also took part in the Student Cultural Centre and worked among many to create and curate it’s art program during the blockade.