When the system cracks, what emerges?

We don’t know about you, but we have been noticing a wave of 2016 nostalgia online lately. The narrative goes something like this: once upon a time, not very long ago, we were moving in the right direction. We remember it well. University students lined their dorm walls with the iconic Obama yes-we-can campaign poster, COP15 was framed as a landmark moment that would surely set the world on a path of redemption from the evils of the past, and same-sex marriage was legalized in the US. The millennials were going to save us. A generation that might actually bend systems toward justice.

Seeing the systems for what they are

Looking back now, that version of the world feels harder to hold onto. Who exactly was that "we"?

Because that story only works if you believe the systems we had were working. Right now, armed conflicts are redrawing borders and lives. Bombs are dropped in some places; in others, memory itself is contested. War spills far beyond battlefields, into health systems, displacement, and intergenerational trauma. At the same time, climate change is accelerating vulnerability, reshaping disease, and forcing people from their homes.

This is not just instability. It is a rupture. Systems we were told were stable - global health systems, political institutions, climate governance - are being exposed for what they are, not just fragile, but fundamentally unequal. Built on histories of extraction and exclusion, they were never meant to protect everyone, only to sustain stability for those already in power.

What is emerging right now is not new. It is what was always there, just easier to ignore.

Sitting with the stories we avoid

This is why we invite you to Global Health Film Days. Not to escape from that reality, but to sit with it. Film has a way of cutting through abstraction, bringing us closer to lives and experiences that are often flattened into statistics, policy briefs, or headlines.

Across the films, we encounter people who refuse to look away, who act in the face of suffering even when it is uncomfortable. We are brought into ways of understanding health that challenge dominant frameworks entirely, where relationships to land, community, and more-than-human life are central rather than peripheral.

These are not new ways of knowing. They have long been sidelined in favour of extractive systems that continue to shape global health today.

What these films do is not just tell stories. They disrupt the illusion that the systems we are used to are neutral, inevitable, or just.

And this is where we need to be careful. It is easy, especially in places like Denmark, to position ourselves as compassionate observers. To feel, to empathise, to care. But global health does not need more passive compassion; it needs critique and it needs action.

We cannot continue to sit comfortably within narratives of Scandinavian exceptionalism, on an imagined pedestal of humanitarianism, while the systems we are part of contribute to the inequities we claim to address. This moment asks us to look not only at what is happening elsewhere, but at what we are implicated in here.

Holding it together, together

We students have always been at the forefront of these kinds of moments. Demands for justice and equity rarely begin from positions of comfort. And yet, the space for student activism feels increasingly under pressure in many places. In a world where we are constantly exposed to crises, there is also a risk of becoming numb. Of turning away not because we do not care, but because it becomes too much to hold by yourself.

But maybe that is also the point. That we are not meant to hold it alone.  

Coming together does not reduce the challenges, but it may make them more bearable. Sometimes the hardest part is simply showing up, being there and reflecting together, even without clear answers.

And maybe that is also what this festival can achieve. A group of students coming together to build something for each other, a space to sit with, question, and engage with the world we are part of. Not because it offers solutions, but because it makes it possible to show up. To sit with discomfort, to question, to engage, and to do so collectively.

Coming together, however, is not neutral. It also means asking whose stories we are used to hearing, and whose we are not. Not just who appears on screen, but whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, and whose continues to be overlooked.

And maybe hope is not always where we begin. When hope feels distant, what remains is courage, the courage to stay present, to remain critical, and to engage with the world as it is, while insisting that it can be otherwise. Grounded in our shared challenges, but also in our shared responsibility to not reproduce the very systems we claim to resist.

The task is not simply to rebuild what is breaking. It is to ask who it was built for in the first place, and to recognise and protect the alternatives that have always existed, but have been pushed aside.

Because emergence is not only about what comes next. It is about what we finally choose to see, and what we choose to do with it.

So come sit with it. Come watch, listen, question, and stay a little longer than may feel comfortable. Not because it will give you all the answers, but because it might change what you are no longer able to ignore.

Names of all signees:

• Alexandra Haavardsson Gates, BA in Film and Media Studies
• Alicia Bock, Organizational Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Copenhagen Business School
• Anna Azzolini, MSc in Global Health
• Bea Kraljii, MSc in Global Health
• Deniz Urgan, MSc in Global Health
• Freja Kjærgaard, BA in Public Health
• Julia Lückel, MSc in Molecular Biomedicine
• Kaylee de Lange, MSc in Global Health
• Isabella Faghtmann, MSc in Global Health
• Malin Bormann, MSc in Global Health
• Mansingh Aidee, MSc in Global Health
• Marieke Dohrmann, MSc in Global Health
• Maria Johansen, MSc in Global Health
• Micaela Fernanda Merino Henriquez, MSc in Global Health
• Marie Camara, BA in Psychology and Cultural Encounters
• Sara Higuera Durán, MSc in Global Health
• Zosia Szulc, MSc in Public Health
• Xenia Klerk Kurpatow, MSc in Global Development