Screening Resilience #3: Resisting Hate, A Rohingya Documentary
Throughout 2026, The Civilian Agenda is hosting a series of screenings as part of Screening Resilience, a series that brings together newer and older films to raise awareness and ensure that civilian voices are heard.
Across conflicts and generations, communities carry both pain and resilience from surviving violence inside them: in memory, in displacement, in fractured families, in daily survival. Too often, those lives are flattened into headlines, numbers, or political slogans. The Civilian Agenda exists to do the opposite: to listen closely, to make space for testimony, and to resurface older voices so we do not forget what communities continue to carry as violence persists.
Screening Resilience #3: Resisting Hate (Rohingya Documentary, 2025)
Image: Yasmin Ullah, founder and executive director of The Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network featured in the film. Yasmin Ullah is a Rohingya feminist, author, poet, and human rights activist born in Northern Arakan, Myanmar. After living as a refugee in Thailand, she resettled in Canada in 2011. Yasmin previously served as President of the Rohingya Human Rights Network in Canada and has contributed to global advocacy efforts on Rohingya genocide recognition in many countries.
The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar's Rakhine State and among the most persecuted people on the planet. In August 2017, the Myanmar military launched a campaign of killing, burning and expulsion that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh, in what the international community has since recognised as genocide. Nearly a decade on, around a million Rohingya remain in refugee camps or scattered across South and Southeast Asia, still stateless, still denied the right to return home in safety.
But for the Rohingya, the violence of 2017 did not end with displacement. Across the region where they have sought refuge, a new front has opened: an online hate campaign of misinformation, fear-mongering and dehumanising falsehoods, echoing the very propaganda that paved the way for genocide in Myanmar. These narratives spread rapidly on social media, deepening hostility towards a community that has already lost so much and inciting real-world threats against them.
Resisting Hate, released on Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day in 2025, follows a group of brave young Rohingya women who refuse to let these lies define their people. Through their voices, the film captures how fear and hate speech are being weaponised against Rohingya communities in South and Southeast Asia, and what it looks like to fight back: by confronting falsehoods, reclaiming their own narratives, and insisting on truth, dignity and justice.
This screening is part of The Civilian Agenda's "Screening Resilience" strand, exploring how people living through war and persecution reclaim agency and rebuild their lives long after the headlines move on. The film could hardly be more urgent: civil society groups across the region continue to warn of escalating hate speech, misinformation and intimidation targeting Rohingya refugees. Eight years on from the genocide, the women in this film remind us that resisting hatred is not abstract. It is daily, courageous and ongoing work, and it deserves to be witnessed.
Presented by
Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network
Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Asia Pacific Partnership for Atrocity Prevention
Free screening
This month's film is free to watch. Press play below to begin.
Support the work
The Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network is an organisation led by Rohingya women, working to reclaim Rohingya narratives, defend human rights, and build a future grounded in dignity and justice. You can support their work at ourrohingya.org/donate.
You can also contribute to emergency humanitarian relief for Rohingya communities via this GoFundMe campaign.
