Here We Stand: Audio Description
Listen to an audio description for Here We Stand.
Here We Stand is an exhibition of short films created for Bradford 2025 by young people whose cities and lives have been shaped by conflict and activism. Explore a collection of bold, personal, and deeply reflective films, each offering a glimpse into how young people today experience and imagine peace in the context of their everyday realities.
On this page you can find audio described introductions to the work created by each film maker.
Here We Stand Introduction
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Transcription - Here We Stand Introduction
Here We Stand is an exhibition of short films created for Bradford 2025 by young people whose cities and lives have been shaped by conflict and activism. A collection of bold, personal, and deeply reflective films, they each offer a glimpse into how young people today experience and imagine peace in the context of their everyday realities.
Developed with BAFTA-nominated film producer Elhum Shakerifar, Here We Stand brings together young voices from three cities; Bradford, Derry in Northern Ireland, and Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Working in partnership with The Peace Museum in Bradford, Museum of Free Derry and the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, this international project invites reflection on the past and wishes for the future, all told through the eyes of a new generation.
In this collection there are nine videos: two about Bradford, three about Derry and four about Sarajevo. Every video is different and has its own unique style, each telling a story from the point of view of a young person.
Al the videos begin with the word ‘start’ scribbled across a white background which quickly flashes to black, as if it is an old-fashioned video recorder flickering between amateur footage. The dark background features the title of the short film above the name of the creator in a white typewriter font.
Caitlin Askin
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Transcription - Caitlin Askin
Caitlin Askin. Caitlin is a young white woman with long, dark, pearly hair and a fringe dark rimmed glasses and dark lipstick. She begins her introduction looking straight at us as she explains the content of the video. Then we move to a title that reads hilling of the Irish language, an Irish flag flutters in the breeze as Caitlin explains about the Irish language and images of the local area, such as the train station, streets of shops and signage in the Irish language gardens and impressive wall murals are also shown, which really highlight the things Caitlin speaks about.
The next title is international solidarity. This section follows the same format, with different images of the local area shown both present day and from the past. Palestinian flags are also shown and graffiti reading, burn fascism. The next title is dear Sophia. We see the Union Jack flying, as well as the Irish flag and casual photos of the friends together in.
Deibhile Hone + Caoili O’Doherty
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Transcription - Deibhile Hone + Caoili O’Doherty
Untitled by Deibhile Hone. Deibhile is a young white woman with a dark fringe transparent framed glasses and lots of eye makeup. She begins her video smiling, looking directly at us, but her face quickly disappears as the focus shifts to a view of the outside of the Museum of free Derry, an industrial building with large posters and paintings of people holding up signs with slogans as if they were at a protest. As Deibhile speaks about her father, we are shown a photograph of him as a young man, looking very cheerful, sitting in a comfy chair. The streets of Derry go past as if we are the passenger in a car. Flag poles line the pavement. The local graffiti decorates the side of a bridge. People walk on the pavement, cars drive past, and large black lettering on a clean white wall reads, you are now entering free Derry. This same statement is also iced onto a cake with candles as a series of casual family photographs flick past. The rest of the video continues in the same way family photographs spliced between Present day footage of Derry.
The video changes with another title screen with the name Caoili O’Doherty, and then Steven’s video. Caoili is a young white woman with long, pale blonde hair, a nose piercing and several crucifix necklaces. We are shown a black and white photo of the smiling young boy, Stephen in his school uniform. Caoili speaks while looking straight at us her story punctuated with images of some of the people she speaks about newspaper headlines and some of the artefacts she tells us about, such as the school books with scribbles and pictures drawn on them.
There is a silence section of the video. Immediately after Caoili finishes speaking, on screen, there is a black and white photograph of a young boy in a hospital bed with bandages round his head and tubes across his face with the caption, Stephen McConnomy on life support in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Writing next to the photo reads, ‘My granny says that for the three days they remained at his hospital bedside’. Stephen was often unattended by medical staff because they were preoccupied treating a British soldier on the same floor. Despite bag searches and restrictions on public information of Stephen’s condition, family friend was able to sneak a camera in and circulate this image. From this point on, bags were not permitted.
The next screen reads the files related to Stephen’s murder are currently sealed until 2071 before showing the photo of him again as a young boy. The next title reads, heritage work in conflict transformation. Caoili speaks to us again before we’re shown footage of the inside of the free Derry Museum, including signage warning protesters about tear gas, records on record players and a poster with a picture of schools and the statement remember Derry in.
Shadow by Ami Nash
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Transcription - Shadow by Ami Nash
Shadow by Ami Nash. We are introduced to Ami as she looks around the interior of the free Derry Museum. She is a young white woman with long auburn hair tossed over her shoulder. She reads posters on the wall and looks at the exhibits. We then move outside, where Ami looks at a large mural painted on the side of a building of a candle burning next to a list of names and detailed black and white portraits. She is then in a cemetery with an older man, and Ami places flowers on a grave in.
HUM
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Transcription - Hum
Hum begins with quick images intercut with moments of black screen. There are hikers in the grassy foothills of a snow-covered mountain. A young woman wearing a green strappy olive green dress and with dyed purple hair looks out from a balcony a city’s rooftops, beneath a blue sky with wispy white clouds tinged with gold and pink from a sunset or dawn. A young couple hike through a leafy forest on a warm day. The girl on the roof is joined by Hanan, a young man with short, unkempt dark hair and dark goatee beard. He wears a blue-grey t-shirt and relaxed beige chinos. A dozen or so people share evening drinks at street tables beneath the fairy lights of Sarajevo’s cheerfully decorated Behut cafe. A man in a royal blue t-shirt and denim shirts, sitting on a bench in the communal garden of a tenement building, watches an old lady and a toddler. Hanan, walking through woods shirtless and in bermuda shorts, turns to the camera behind him and smiles. A young woman walks on a path lined with trees, towards a flat-roofed building with a tall adjoining tower – it could be for something like broadcasting or air traffic control.
When Hanan’s voiceover gets to the word ‘peace’, the word appears in large yellow letters against a shot of a blue sky and white clouds. The font is a loose, handwriting-style. There will be further on-screen text and it will all look this way.
The middle section of the film is a conversation in Serbian between Hanan, now wearing a loose pink t-shirt and dark grey shorts, and Marko, who wears a tight white long-sleeved running top and black shorts, earrings in each earlobe, and a short, light brown haircut. They sit on a bench together on a high green hill above a dense forest, with a city and more hills in the distance. The angle of the warm light suggests the sun is going down. Hanan asks what the concept of peace means to Marko, who has complained of a head full of noisy thoughts. Hanan suggests that peace is always all around us, but that we miss it because it’s… quiet.
The English voiceover continues over quick shots of a couple in a hammock, purple flowers, a church, a metro train, a wide green landscape glimpsed through a car window, friends sharing a meal, Marko laughing on a speeding bicycle, more shirtless forest hiking, a graffiti’d skate park, wind turbines on a distant hill at sunset, dancers in a nightclub, a sunset through a car’s rear windscreen, a city street at night, friends playing frisbee in a forest clearing. At ‘open your eyes’, those words appear in white on a black background. Back on the hill, Hanan says to Marko that maybe peace isn’t something we find, but something we return to. Then they head off in search of pizza. The words ‘What does peace mean to me?’ appear in white on a black background, except for ‘peace’ which is in bright orange.
An epilogue begins with the text in yellow, ‘A message to you’. Hanan speaks to camera, which is being held by Marko. They’re descending the hill down a hiker’s path lined with tall trees. When Marko starts speaking, it’s Hanan that’s behind the camera as they walk. Then Marko runs off leaving Hanan behind to swear at him in (censored) Serbian. The word ‘fin’ appears white on black.
MY MOM
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Transcription - MY MOM
MY MOM begins with a photograph of a young woman in her wooden-floored apartment, smiling as she switches on a small artificial Christmas tree next to a lit wood-burning stove. More still images follow: monochrome shots of a bombed-out city, and a man typing on a (very 1990s) computer keyboard in the office of Iris Energoinvest. On film, a young woman in an unremarkable apartment puts a floral dressing gown over her pyjamas and makes coffee using a small primus stove, a metal coffee pot and china cups and saucers. She sits at a dressing table and puts on make-up (eyeshadow, lipstick), before dressing in a white shirt and tartan suit and black leather shoes. A close-up of her feet shows her walking on a pavement. Then we’re back to still photographs. The first shows Luna as a child being held by her Mom, who has a large metal fixator sticking out of her left arm. A handwritten note from Mom to Luna explains the extensive surgery and stitches her arm needed (and she apologises to Luna that she looks bad in the picture!). There follow photographs of a smiling Mom in hospital in 1993; a family birthday party in 1994 (Luna’s sisters 5th) with Mom, three children and a chocolate cake; Mom smiling with her work colleagues in 1995; and other happy-looking domestic family scenes.
In the Serbian voiceover, Mom describes living in Skenderija when the war began, violence in the streets, and her place of work, Iris Energoinvest, being burned down. Just after leaving a job interview in May 1993 she was caught in a bomb blast. Shrapnel injured her arm, but in the moment she was more concerned about her smart blazer. She says she was lucky that the shrapnel ‘only’ crushed one bone – had the injury been any worse she probably would have lost her arm. She says that the incident made the war more viscerally real to her, less abstract, and that she felt less safe, no longer invincible. But she did get that job – and turned it down for a better one at a bank! She says that during the war the conditions were tough and they weren’t paid, but that the routine was helpful and it set her up for a beautiful life later on.
PEACE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
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Transcription - PEACE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
PEACE UNDER CONSTRUCTION contains conversations with four young interviewees, intercut with a montage of images of modern city life overlaid with the filmmaker Demijian Catic’s own thoughts.
Adna is 25, from Bosnia & Herzegovina. She sits on a wooden bench in front of a dense background of leafy green trees. She has dyed red hair and wears a strappy black top, with her sunglasses perched on her head. For her, peace is a personal tranquil state where she isn’t continually hearing her own thoughts, and also a broader situation where everybody has rights and those rights are respected.
Darin is 22, also from Bosnia & Herzegovina. He wears a loose pink shirt and has shoulder length brown hair. He sits on a bench in an urban park in front of two thick tree trunks. He considers peace to be a state of being where one is never afraid. He says that one person can’t change the world by themselves but when there’s a snowball effect of people coming together, everything becomes possible.
PRICAJ SINE
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Transcription - PRICAJ SINE
PRICAJ SINE is Serbian for ‘Talk to me, son.’ Though it isn’t confirmed on screen, we might infer that the unnamed Roma woman being interviewed is the mother of filmmaker Almir Agic.
Almir begins the film with a poetic narration over images of a leafy inner-city street, a cigarette burning in a simple metal ashtray, and hands flipping through a sheaf of family photographs. We linger on one, a domestic scene in which a laughing man lifts a delighted woman into the air. Almir’s father and mother years ago? Almir’s words here translate as, ‘The war is over. Now we live in a peace that isn’t ours. Here where smoke rises to the sky, where silences are louder than grenades. There were no sirens when they started ignoring us. There are none now either, as they bomb us with words.’
The subject being interviewed is a Roma woman, somewhere in her 50s. She has jet black hair scraped back into a ponytail, and dark, tired eyes. She wears a simple metal hoop earring in each earlobe, a low-necked green top with a print of white flowers, and dark blue jeans. She sits against a wall of pale, beige bricks with dark grey pointing. As she speaks, she hugs her right knee towards her chest. She talks of the shock and uncertainty of the war’s beginning, and of her status as a Roma woman making her feel even more vulnerable; the discrimination she faces on a day-to-day basis becoming even worse in wartime. She says that the thought of peace in the future gave her hope, but that now the war has ended, she still feels no peace in her mind. Roma continue to face prejudice and social inequality. She believes they will always feel othered, and that their participation in the war has been forgotten or glossed over.
In the film’s final minute, the cigarette in the ashtray is stubbed out, and there’s a quick scene of a young woman – with only the bottom half of her face shown in close-up – having a woven scarf removed from her mouth to allow her to speak. Over a still shot of a street in darkness but for the weak glow of a single streetlight – possibly the same street we were on at the beginning – Almir reads: ‘Everything has an end: war, a cigarette, and silence. Why must we endure the curses of others? Why must we lock our mouths for their sins?’
Almir published a poetry collection, The Cactus in the Orchid Field, earlier this year.
Movement by Louis Haslam Chance
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Transcription - Movement by Louis Haslam Chance
Movement by Louis Haslam Chance. Still images of protest posters displaying bold statements such as, fight for a new normal, anarchy forever be an enemy of the state, are mixed with brief clips of archival footage from a variety of protests, both historic and more current in both black and white and colour, all in portrait mode, as if displayed on a mobile phone.
Free Palestine placards bob up and down feet pound the streets vast, swarming crowds move slowly down the road, blurry, black and white lines of protesters on horseback, people jump and fist pump the air in defiance, the archival footage is overlaid with the filmmakers own protest words. Movement is protest. Protest is movement, walking together, thinking together. We walk for the dead and the living God.
Perception by Ady Hussain
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Transcription - Perception by Ady Hussain
Perception by Ady Hassain. A caption at the start reads footage from a Tiktok post by Hasasain, underscore Hammad nine, footage from an X post by Gaza. Notice via archive.org social media footage of the bombing of a building in Palestine is layered with an animation of a Palestinian man in military clothing. The man turns to look but the screen goes blank. Nothing is left. The animated character looks up as if waiting for the next bomb to fall. We are left with the image of an iPhone camera lens.
The Archiver by Aarman Ali
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Transcription - The Archiver by Aarman Ali
The Archiver by Aarman Ali. A 62nd collection of archival protest footage spliced with video and images of archive boxes, protest posters and library shelves filled with books about Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, amongst others. Footage is stitched together rhythmically and zoomed into or out of in order to direct our attention to important words or images, such as we will dream with our eyes open.
Pro life is pro control. Freedom for Palestine, the revolution will not be televised. There’s a white female protester in a headscarf being dragged from her place whilst another appears to continue their protest song or chant whilst dragged by their wrists.
Head Checked by Mahboob and Sarah Derrick
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Transcription - Head Checked by Haider Mahboob and Sarah Derrick
Head Checked by Haider Mahboob and Sarah Derrick. A warm and engaging music video for Echo machine. One song, get your head checked out. The singer is at ease in front of the camera and looks straight at the lens confidently with a playful feel. He often laughs and dances along in between lip syncing the lyrics of the song, an engaging performer. The film takes us on a journey with the lead singer along Bradford streets and into the one in 12 club as he opens up the building for the day. The singer is a white man in his 30s, and he wears a woollen white cap with a rolled brim and a rounded top. It appears to be a chitrali cap, which has eastern Afghanistan and Pakistani origins. In the recording studio, he is dressed casually in a black and cream zipped up tracksuit top with red and green stripes down the arms and red and white stripes around the collar.
Throughout the rest of the film, he wears a navy blue boiler suit in preparation for his poster pasting that happens later in the film. The one in 12 club is owned and run by its membership as a collective based upon anarchist principles, and its activities include social and political campaigning. This is apparent in the footage of the club, where a Palestinian flag is draped over a speaker and walls are emblazoned with stickers concerning various issues such as fossil free pride and Anti Fascist action amongst various band stickers, likely bands who have played in this renowned venue, the singer carefully adds an echo machine one sticker to the collection on a fiery red wall. The singer takes us around various locations within the club, a music studio, the stage and the venue’s performance space and a library where he sits in a shaft of light only highlighted by the use of black and white, whilst the rest of the footage is in colour. He posts posters onto stairwell walls and on the outside of the building.
At the end, the singer closes a door dubbed with the anarchist symbol, a capital letter, an inside a circle and the words, no sexism, no racism, no homophobia. The poster piercing outcomes are revealed to be a series of letters spelling out another world is possible on the outside wall of the One in 12 Club.
The Story of a Girl in Iran by Kimia Modaressi
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Transcription - The Story of a Girl in Iran by Kimia Modaressi
The Story of a Girl in Iran by Kimia Modaressi. A short black and white film with a collage of brief video clips which mirror the storytelling. Often, the images closely reflect the words we hear a basketball falling through its hoop, or a young girl lying under her bed covers. Sometimes there are no images at all, just white captions on a black background, emphasising the power and importance of the words in this story, the hopeful and nostalgic feel of the start of the film, which features a young Iranian girl smiling sweetly up at a just out of shop, Baba and something reminiscent of home video camera footage of the young girl’s birthday party are replaced by darker and more threatening images, plumes of smoke and multiple explosions, buildings on fire and with exterior walls ripped off, delicate curtains torn to shreds and entire buildings destroyed. The stark images are interspersed with the captions emphasising the terror experienced by the young girl.