Screening on
19 Aug at Close-Up cinema
Tomorrow's History shorts 01
Tomorrow's History is a two-part shorts programme curated by Sine Screen, presented as part of Vulnerable HistorIes, an on-going series that explores the representation of historical trauma in East & Southeast Asia, bringing together experimental works from Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, China and Hong Kong that delve into a range of personal and collective narratives.
Working with alternative mediums such as animation, digital reenactments and reconstruction of archives, the artists actively question the validity and limitations of the indexical documentary image in representing historical events and its impacts. These visually inventive shorts not only portray historical narratives but also seek to document “history in the making” through highlighting contemporary moments of social change. From the colonial history in the Philippines, aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the social movement in Hong Kong, to the White Terror period in Taiwan.
By juxtaposing the historical with the present-day, the programme seeks to examine how history comes to be documented, narrated, remembered and erased.
Total runtime: 70min
Landscape series no.1
Dir Nguyen Trinh Thi | Vietnam | 2013 | 5min
Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news-media, for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.”
Retour
Dir Huang Pang-Chuan | France | 2017 | 21min
Two journeys take place in two different periods. One is a return by rail, passing through two continents; the other is an old photograph tracing back to war life. The rhythmic swaying of the train merges past and present, revealing a forgotten memory, and a longing for a place called Taiwan.
That Spring, In The Sky of H-Ville, There Was _
Dir Chung Hong IU | 2022 | Hong Kong | 9min
That spring, there was _____ in the sky of H-ville. What is _____? No one can tell. The sudden “unknown” caused absurd and strange phenomena. The real nightmare was not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. The regime used this to implement the "state of exception". The system continued to operate. How much human value would be left? An absurd dystopian take on Hong Kong’s social movement under the context of the pandemic.
Parasite family
Dir Prapat Jiwarangsan | 2022 | Thailand | 5min
Re-discovered film negatives represent families of affluence who absorbed Thailand’s wealth, like parasites. The journey from analog to digital, and finally to AI-generated images, gradually evolves these captured faces into a new species of monster.
Devil’s Peak
Dir Simon Liu | 2021 | Hong Kong | 30min
Through overlapping poetic narratives and coded references, Devil’s Peak reflects on recent unprecedented shifts in the socio-cultural fabric of the artist’s homeland of Hong Kong, creating a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.