by april forrest lin 林森
In shorts programme Angels Fill Me With Horror, eight films survey myths and monsters, anxiety and trauma, in relation to land, place, identity and the seasons.
Edith Morris’s Trolsk materialises Norwegian folkloric figures through a craftful blend of costume, performance and 16mm. As the figures reveal themselves in the Arctic landscape, awesome scales of time and space unfurl as the veil between legend and place is gently lifted. In Yashasvi Juyal’s Rains don’t make us happy anymore, oneiric observation fuses documentary and fabulation as the last remaining member of the Jaunsari people recounts the story of Lohari, a village in the Himalayas engulfed by the waters of a hydroelectric dam.
Resurrect Me as a Parasite by gabi dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury follows a vampiric trio as it takes turns inducting a new host – a visceral process replete with blood and hormones, shrouded in a sense of quotidian ritual. Contextualised against flourishing post-extractionist ruins, the organic merges with the synthetic as the parasitic engenders a chance at rebirth. In Rhiana Bonterre’s A Story, An Invocation, An Opening, pulsations of rhythm travel through the collective body, invoking spectral residues of intergenerational trauma. Family footage of Trinidad Carnival riffs off somatic intuitive dance to deliver an embodied poetics on how forces of spirit expel and propel through ritualised sound and movement.
In Marguerite Carson’s the bird sings with its fingers, the Super 8 gaze beholds seabirds dipping in and out of frame, weaving through a sonic constellation of ghostly whispers and field recordings. Evoking ornithomancy, the birds are likened to angels, portending occult encounters. In Florence is for Lovers by Lily Ekimian Ragheb and Ahmed Ragheb, text-to-speech translations and Hi8 tape configure an uncanny travel vlog to the eponymous city. Structured through reticent responses to a persistent stranger, this docu-fiction is an ode to place complete with morbid anecdotes and handheld close-ups.
Beach Day by Damien Gong explores the relationship between the lived body, the perceived body, and technologies of image-making. Renewing and reinterpreting family archive footage through a process of rotoscoping, trace monotyping, and stop motion animation parallels the filmmaker’s evolving relationship to his body during gender transition, generating a precisely maximalist racket of fish, muscles and football. Named after the wondrous activity of appreciating autumnal foliage, Vito Rowlands’s Leaf Peeper is a chaotic stop motion lyric to woodland hues of amber and ochre. Be warned: an overdose of such glorious shades may have irreversible effects – especially when delivered through frame rates jittering with unbearable excitement – as demonstrated by the onscreen puppets.
