Mobile Phones as Witnesses

Name: Mobile Phones as Witnesses
Start: 2026-05-30T18:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-05-30T19:00:00+02:00
Location: Festival Centre: Atrium Tower

30 May, 2026, 6.00 PM @ Festival Centre: Atrium Tower

Event language: English

What role do mobile phones play in documenting life under authoritarian rule? In contexts shaped by censorship, surveillance, and repression, mobile footage has become an essential tool of witnessing, self-representation, and resistance. This session explores the possibilities and limits of self-recorded material in documentary practice: as evidence, as personal testimony, and as cinematic language. At its core are questions of authorship, visibility, responsibility, and the ethical use of images produced under political pressure.

A conversation bringing together perspectives from filmmaking and lived experience, followed by a discussion on authorship, ethics, and documentary form.

Tickets

Program Info

Mobile Phones as Witnesses

Guests

Mahnaz Mohammadi

Mahnaz Mohammadi is an Iranian filmmaker working between documentary and fiction. In her work, seeing is not a sufficient ground for truth; the image can simultaneously reveal and conceal. She focuses on interpretation, context, and multiple narratives, shaped by a lived experience of restriction.

Soraya Akhlaghi

Soraya Akhlaghi is a multidisciplinary artist working in the fields of sculpture, painting, and film. She began sculpting in 2016 and, by 2025, had created over 200 papier-mâché sculptures. In 2017, she expanded her practice to painting. From 2018 to 2025, she worked as a cinematographer, sound engineer, and co- director of the film "A Fox Under A Pink Moon," directed and produced by Mehrdad Oskouei, in which she is the protagonist and main character of the film.

Moderation

Jana Sepehr

Jana Sepehr was born in Hamburg and studied sociology, political science, globalisation and development studies in Kiel, Maastricht and San Diego. For her master thesis she spent two month at the University of Ghana to do research on brain drain migration. Since 2015 she is working as a freelance journalist for Die Zeit, Der Spiegel and ZDF among others. At Dokumentale, she serves as the chief-editor for publications.