About

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, film programmer, educator and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explore themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and resistance often through anti-colonial, participatory and archival methodologies.

His most recent film is a documentary essay called “The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing”, has screened in more than 200 festivals worldwide. It has won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2025, the Best Short Film at IDFA in 2024, was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2025, a European Film Award in 2026 as well as winning major awards in festivals such as Go Short, London Short Film Festival, Braziers, Salem, Interaction and others. It was also awarded Short of the Year 2025 by Short Film Conference.

He is currently developing his first feature documentary film supported by BFI Doc Society, Screen Scotland and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) with the title Before Our Diaspora.

He is completing a practice-as-research PhD at the University of West of Scotland which explores anti-colonial methodologies, film and performance as counternarrative to recently digitised film archives of 1930s Palestine.

He has also worked as a film programmer, having curated screenings for London Short Film Festival, Filmhouse Edinburgh’s Doc Screen, Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival and the SAFAR Film Festival. He has been selected as part of multiple programming labs and initiatives such as The Barbican Emerging Curators (2023), SAFAR Futures (2022) and Film Hub Scotland's New Promoter Scheme (2021) and has worked as a pre-selector for Sheffield Docfest (2026), Slamdance (2025) and Encounters Short Film Festival (2023)