Film: Echoes from Borderland

Lara Milena Brose, GER 2024, 70 min.

Tickets: 8.5€ / 7€ Donations go to the Collective Aid

As part of KEW 2025, we are organizing a film screening and discussion with Collective Aid to raise awareness of the ongoing violence suffered by refugees in the Balkans.

Only 140 years ago, no country required a visa for entry. The tightening of border controls led to discrimination. Today, more than a million people attempt to cross borders illegally every year, many of them fleeing war and persecution. Nahid, a determined 15-year-old girl from Afghanistan, finds herself stranded in the Bosnian border town of Velika Kladuša, where she meets Ferida, a 67-year-old Bosnian widow struggling with her own war-torn past. Nahid slowly discovers that the cycle of war and loss connects her to this place on the edge of the European Union in an unexpected way. The two women begin to recognize themselves in each other's experiences.

Collective Aid runs a project in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as projects in Serbia and Greece. In Sarajevo, Collective Aid identifies people on the move who have violations or report violence and offers to report appropriate cases to the Borderviolence Monitoring Network, a network that monitors human rights violations at the EU's external borders. Collective Aid also distributes relief supplies such as hygiene articles, sleeping bags, clothing and shoes.