Film Screening and Public Launch Discussion: 'Dargeçit' (Hold Still) and Archives of Solidarity

The Archives of Solidarity project team invites you to the screening of Berke Baş’s Hold Still (Dargeçit), followed by a discussion with director Berke Baş, Dr Noémi Lévy-Aksu and Jelnar Ahmad.

Hold Still follows the decades-long legal struggle of a lawyer and several families in Turkey seeking justice for their loved ones who disappeared in the 1990s. It reveals how memory endures through legal files, hearings, and the persistent pursuit of truth, and how art can play a vital role in documenting these struggles for justice. The film draws on reports and materials on enforced disappearances in Turkey produced by Hafıza Merkezi since 2011.

The discussion following the film also marks the public launch of Archives of Solidarity, an AHRC-funded project at SOAS Anthropology and Sociology. The project generates a digital archive that documents how refugees and citizens create spaces of care and support under conditions of precarity and hostility in Turkey and the UK, offering a living record of solidarity practices.

The Syrian Archive at Mnemonic responds to a different but related history of state violence, preserving digital traces of images, videos, and records that might otherwise be lost, denied, or erased. Archives of Solidarity, in contrast, focuses less on documenting loss and more on the practices of mutual care and world-making that communities build together.

Placed in dialogue, these initiatives ask how archives of disappearance, of violence, of solidarity can resist erasure, sustain connections, and open pathways for justice. They remind us that archiving is not only about preserving the past, but also about shaping solidarities in the present and imagining futures that might otherwise be foreclosed.

This is a special evening to watch, reflect, and discuss. All are welcome.