Film screenings and conversation with Sanaz Azimipour and Aykan Safoğlu, moderated by Rovshana Orujova
Saturday, 24 October 2026 · 19:00
AKEBI e.V., Böckhstraße 24, 10967 Berlin
AKEBI e.V. and Armenian Movies Day invite you to the fourth and final event of The Little Pomegranate Series, a programme bringing together queer films, artists, and communities from the lands of pomegranates and their diasporas.
For our closing evening, we will screen two short films by Sanaz Azimipour and Aykan Safoğlu, followed by a conversation with both filmmakers and the audience, moderated by social scientist and documentary filmmaker Rovshana Orujova.
Through different approaches to filmmaking, both works explore how personal experiences and memories are shaped by broader political realities, and how collective histories are carried through relationships, everyday life, and artistic practice.
Film programme
Sitting With the Mess (2023, 20’)
Directed by Sanaz Azimipour
Sitting With the Mess is a self-ethnographic documentary that traces the story of feminist organising in Berlin through a personal lens during the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî movement in 2022 and 2023. Grounded in the notion that the personal is political, the film examines the complexities, contradictions, and emotional labour of collective work. It looks at feminist organisation beyond both romanticisation and victimisation, choosing instead to dwell in the messiness — its fractures, its intimacies, its conflicts, and its possibilities.
Sanaz Azimipour is a writer and researcher working across archives, texts and video. She explores political movements from within, collective memory, and counter-histories, examining how political struggles endure through relationships, affects, and everyday life. Drawing on feminist ethnography, and archival practices, she investigates how histories are remembered, felt, and contested across generations and geographies.
Hundsstern steigt ab [Dog Star Descending] (2020, 12’)
Directed by Aykan Safoğlu
Dog Star Descending looks to the skies above a North Aegean island, inviting us into the flickering dreams and memories of an artist. Photographs, shredded and reassembled, spark reminiscences in the artist’s voiceover, which relates the intertwined stories of a family trip to the island of Imbros and of his education at a bilingual German-Turkish school. The coiling timeline of present experience overlaps with other stories detailing the complex intersection of these two cultures, and of personal and intergenerational memories.
Aykan Safoğlu stages transdisciplinary narrations in which his longings, dreams, and contradictions challenge historical time. Navigating time-based, sculptural, and performative images, he makes intimate memory work that defies media conventions. His hybrid artistic forms move, fragment, and reflect ontological questions in photography, film, and performance. Recipient of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 59th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize 2021, he holds a PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He lives and works in Vienna.
Conversation with the filmmakers
The screenings will be followed by a conversation with Sanaz Azimipour and Aykan Safoğlu, moderated by Rovshana Orujova, with the audience invited to take part.
Rovshana is a social scientist pursuing a PhD at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she researches critical migration and border regimes. Her work examines the connections between migration, precarious labour, and gendered inequalities through feminist and materialist perspectives. She is also politically active in feminist and anti-militarist movements in Azerbaijan and the South Caucasus, with experience in solidarity work with imprisoned activists and self-organised grassroots collectives. As a documentary filmmaker, she directed Panjara, exploring feminist struggles in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.
Together, we will open a space to reflect on the relationships between personal experience and political struggle, the work of building collective movements, and the ways memory and belonging are shaped across borders and generations.
We warmly invite you to join us for this final gathering of The Little Pomegranate Series.
Free entry.
Funded by the ComeIn Project of Migrationsrat Berlin e.V.
