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Screening on
Tue 03 Dec 18:20

at Barbican cinema

Precarious Landscapes 01

Consisting of moving-image and experimental works from Thailand, Vietnam, China and Korea, this programme seeks to challenge our relationship to the land in mythical, decolonial and sensorial modes. All films examine what the ‘frame’ of cinema variously reveals and omits with a prescient scrutinisation into ‘sight’ as our privileged form of representation in cinema. Instead, other sensorial elements are brought to the forefront – bringing forth a more embodied encounter with moving images, reshaping our interactions with space and time. 


From exploring the legacies of violence and  in The Red Filter is Withdrawn and Letters from Panduranga to myth and reincarnation in Becoming Alluvium to a philosophical satire on tourism in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s A Room With a Coconut View, all the films examine a thorny, enigmatic and uncertain relationship between the human and non-human.

 

Total runtime: 106min

Becoming Alluvium

Dir. Thao Nguyen Phan | Vietnam | 2019 | 16min


Becoming Alluvium is structured around three chapters telling stories of destruction, reincarnation and renewal, centred around the ebb and flow of the Mekong River, which runs through Tibet, China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.Khmer folk tales, local lore and stories about reincarnation are told through vibrant watercolour animations and observations of daily life. Imbued with a sense of ecological responsibility toward the agricultural realities of the Mekong delta, they reveal a poetic but nonetheless prescient consideration of Vietnam's troubled history.

Letters from Panduranga

Dir. Nguyen Trinh Thi | Vietnam | 2015 | 35min

The essay film, made in the form of a letter exchange between a man and a woman, was inspired by the fact that the government of Vietnam plans to build the country’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan (formerly known as Panduranga), right at the spiritual heart of the Cham indigenous people, threatening the survival of this ancient matriarchal Hindu culture. A docu-fiction which examines central ideas of power and ideology in our everyday. 

The Red Filter is Withdrawn

Dir. Minjung Kim | South Korea | 2020 | 11min

If you look into the entrance of one of the huge caves on the South Korean island of Jeju, it looks like a camera lens. If you walk into the cave, it looks like a screen, a rectangle showing clouds and white light, just like a film. Director Kim Minjung delves into the violent history of Jeju’s uprisings and massacres from 1948. The camera follows the traces in the landscape, sometimes transformed by a strident, distance-creating red light, accompanied by a commentary by avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton. 

 

Look On the Bright Side

Dir. Yuyan Wang | China | 2023 | 16min

In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years. Starting with materials filmed in LED factories in southern China, the film weaves together recycled footage from social networks to portray a community living under the pervasive influence of ever-lasting light. Its abstract narrative reveals an extensive network of intertwined relationships, caught in an era obsessed with unceasing visibility, transparency, and efficiency. 

 

A Room with a Coconut View

Dir. Tulapop Saenjaroen | Thailand | 2018 | 28min

“A Room with a Coconut View” tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticised beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied with the sanitised, touristic images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question his own subjectivity as a tourist and how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.

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