By Batseba Tesfaye
Wednesday Evening, East London: The late November chill pricks my face as I leave the overground station. The winter sun is setting over the city as I walk towards Hoxton Hall. Approaching the building, I see a woman step out of its large wooden doors and jog across the road to the corner shop. I recognise her as Lara, a producer at Counterpoints Arts, and I sense that snacks are coming.
The Counterpoints Arts offices resemble a cosy living room. On one side sits a round, space-age table with egg-shaped chairs and bright orange cushions. Beside it, on a blackboard wall, a calendar drawn in colourful chalk maps the team’s projects for the year. On the other side, behind shelving, is the office space with a small galley kitchen and a sitting area. The walls are filled with posters from Refugee Week over the years: Moomins, photo portraits, superheroes, and many more.
This evening, the calendar is partly covered by a roll-down screen while someone fiddles with a projector. We make small talk as we set up the space. As predicted, Lara returns with her arms full of popcorn. A few minutes later, we dim the lights and press play.
This was the spirit of Our Shared Futures: Climate and Migration Community Film Festival.
In its first year, the festival, presented and curated by Counterpoints Arts, explored how conflict drives and intensifies climate change, amplifies displacement, and intersects with past and present causes of human migration. Featuring five films, two feature-length and three short, the festival offered opportunities for people and communities to engage with these issues and have meaningful conversations around them. Free to join, it showcased a wide range of stories, from an elderly Quechua couple in Bolivia to a Kenyan farmer who becomes a community advocate, to a multi-visual poem examining current issues through the lens of the extinct dodo. Over two weeks, people organised hundreds of screenings across the country: in living rooms, cinemas, production houses, libraries, community gardens and universities. My aim was to attend as many as I could in London.
I had joined Counterpoints Arts for a research placement as part of my master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Oxford. An artist at heart, stories are my obsession. I love telling them, receiving them and spreading them. It was why I became a journalist in Eritrea, and why I was now starting a new journey as a fiction writer. When I came to the UK over a decade ago as an asylum seeker, the arts became my lifeline. I spent my time reading and in libraries, seeking refuge in books and films; a familiar point of comfort in a very new world.
I know the power of words. Stories shape how we understand the world, which is why they are so often protected, debated or suppressed. Our media shapes discourse and public opinion, and having seen how refugees and asylum seekers are spoken about, I wanted to explore how artists and arts organisations offer counter-narratives: how, instead of creating division, they create space for unity, growth, healing and connection. I knew about Counterpoints Arts through Refugee Week, having worked in charities and arts organisations that support refugee and asylum-seeking people. When it came time to choose a placement for my course, they were the first I reached out to.
After the screening is over, the team discusses the two short films while glasses are cleared and equipment packed away. I walk back to the station with Meren, another producer. She tells me about her work in mental health, and I tell her about the novel I’ve begun writing. We part ways, and I take another train to Loughborough Junction for the next festival screening. On the journey, I look at the city and think about the dodo. About migration, extinction, water and the earth. I think about what it means to be from a place or not, to belong or not, to put down roots or not, to thrive or survive.
The screening in Loughborough Junction is hosted by Thread Ahead, a charity working at the intersection of fast fashion, climate change and migration. Over slices of pizza, I speak with the attendees, one of the founders, and Kwiz, a volunteer and displaced person who is now an advocate and a law student. We watch the feature documentary Thank You For The Rain. Afterwards, Kwiz and I talk about the film and about farmers we knew back home who, like the film’s protagonist, live on the front lines of climate change, fighting every day for their families’ survival.
The film festival is a truly community-driven event. Screenings take place everywhere: libraries, corporate offices, local cinemas, community centres, gardens and allotments, in the comfort of people’s homes and in the living rooms of friends.
Over the next two weeks, I attend screenings across the city. I watch Utama at Birkbeck Cinema, hosted by the Student Union, where I speak with Pooja, a PhD student researching climate change and unfair water access in India. Later, at Dirty Looks, a post-production studio, I watch two short films and discuss accessibility in the arts with a Tate Britain curator while eating an endless bowl of cheese puffs.
I meet people from all backgrounds: activists who love film, people working in the refugee sector who care about climate change, students, campaigners, researchers, artists and office workers; people with displaced backgrounds and people whose families have been in Britain for generations. All sharing a desire to learn, an openness to new perspectives, and a willingness to engage in conversations that, while sometimes uncomfortable, are necessary.
Between screenings, I dip in and out of the work happening in the office. Lara shows me the work she’s doing for Refugee Week’s Simple Acts: a list of nine small things people can do to participate in the movement. Each year’s acts are co-created with an artist and centre on a particular theme. Next year’s theme will be ‘courage’ and will feature the illustrations of a truly wonderful artist – details to be announced soon! When asked to write the copy for these illustrations, I do so with delight.
On my last day, the team invites me to a screening of the first film produced by Counterpoints Productions: The Light That Remains. On the train home, I think about the film and how its subjects use ancestral wisdom and modern technology to create spaces for healing refuges in the midst of war. My heart feels heavy. The film is deeply moving and sorrowful, yet underneath, like the steel rails of the train carriage, the story pulses with a steady vein of hope and imaginative resilience.
All the conversations I had, the stories shared and received, hopes expressed and questions asked, showed me what stories do. They bind us: like train tracks across cities, fibre-optic cables beneath oceans, mycelial networks beneath the earth, and gravity across space. Stories are threads that help us realise a world that is more unified instead of fractured, stronger instead of weaker, hopeful rather than hopeless.
Perhaps that is why, instinctively, to this day we do what our ancestors have always done: when the sun has set and the evening stars are out, we gather in a dark cave around a fire. And with shadows dancing on the walls, we drink, share food, laugh, and tell stories.
Image: Still from Thank You For The Rain (directed by Julia Dahr and Kisilu Musya)
