by april forrest lin 林森
In Arrivals And Departures, six films ruminate on the relationship between bodies and borders, consent and control, desire and power.
In Clear, Hogan Seidel utilises layering and mixed opacities to explore the disciplining and othering of bodies that nation states are predicated upon. The specific vulnerability that trans and gender nonconforming people experience under corporeal surveillance is highlighted via an audiovisual cacophony of US Transportation Security Administration instructions, news reportage and screen grabs.
Contemplating the ever-shifting relationship between home and land, Dorothy Cheung’s as a bird that briefly perches is a diasporic treatise on the myriad ways in which uprooting and re-rooting take place in a migratory lifetime. The film itself becomes a moving organism as it combines interviews with digital and analogue to dip its fingers in the soils of reflection. Yash Zhang’s A Journey of the Leaves meanders alongside the filmmaker, its diaristic tones forging an unhurried yet transient crevice nestled between nostalgia and mourning. Isolation and exile swirl with dreams and memories, rippling the past into the present with each new encounter.
In The Flow of Resilience, Pranami Koch lets her gaze linger on a gifted diary, which becomes a portal to accessing the experiences of accused witches living in Assam, northeastern India. This meditative documentary sits with these women’s testimonies to gently observe how daily life continues in the aftermath of patriarchal violence, the film self-reflexively constituting its own entry to the archive of trauma. The archive figures again in Charles Dillon Ward’s Burn-in – here in a digital context, where the pervasiveness of documentation has engendered a request to be deleted. Playfully, we are taken on a quest of smeared pixels, glitching as we try to regain a sense of anonymity in the digital abyss, witnessing the uncanny wrestle between permanence and oblivion.
Time and space are similarly distorted in ULÍA by Laura Moreno Bueno, with multiple re-exposed landscapes subtending themselves to form mythical places firmly anchored in reality. A longitudinal exercise of analogue commitment, Bueno’s film posits geography as a question of blurry outlines rather than definite borders.
