In the first eight months of 2025, at least 864 people have been executed in Iran. That is twice as many as during the same period in 2024. Execution as an instrument of political control, as a ritual of intimidation – the state is killing people to make us forget.

Over and beyond these boundaries, other significant shifts are taking place: Words are losing weight, images are losing clarity, violence is made to seem reasonable – on political, religious and administrative levels. We live in a time when oppression becomes justifiable, and war, displacement, state repression, and genocide are no longer denied or concealed. The legitimacy of violence is looming large throughout the globe.

The festival 3 Days to Liberation offers a space for art, language, and for grievance and mourning, to act against the silence and the neglect that is inscribed into our discourse; a space of encounter for voices from the most diverse backgrounds, in which the tensions and frictions are made visible and audible. A space where film, theatre, music, and debate find together as forms of resistance, testimony, and advocacy, in which we ask what freedom means, and what price we have to pay when political systems set out to legitimate tyranny, and societies put up with that.

Liberation is not a static condition, it is action and process – a risky endeavour, a transition, a word whose meaning has to be negotiated. Liberation only happens when people can speak out, play and sing, and when they refuse to adopt the language of power.

This space is a journey through memories, stories and bodies. Anyone stepping inside carries fragments of their past: voices, smells, fractures, images that seem impossible to place. When they interact, a different kind of knowledge will emerge – no fixed knowledge, rather a living and breathing, shared kind of wisdom. A form of knowledge that grows out of testimony, out of love, fear, loss, and out of the refusal to be muted and remain silent.

In a follow-up to the first part two years ago, 3 Days to Liberation II continued this process at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz between 12-14 December 2025. The experience of the 2023 event gave rise to new forms and formats of coming together and talking, and initiated a shift from individual testimony to shared responsibility, from moments of rebellion to long-term processes and an ongoing work on collective memory and remembrance.

This year’s program follows the paths of artists, filmmakers, activists and theorists whose work oscillates between art, academic research and political activism. In films, performances, concerts and on panels, they will sound out the relationship between memory and body, between resistance and language. This is liberation transformed into a practice of remembrance and action, into an artistic, existential, and collective gesture. Every story carries the history of a movement within, a movement that outlasts the revolt, revitalized with every breath, every utterance, every encounter.

Original text by Maryam Palizban; translated by Bettina Seifried