by Jonathan Ali
Through music, animation, sign language and photography, the five films in Postscripts explore the depths and intricacies of grief and loss.
In Nadia Shihab’s warm and attentive Sister Mother Lover Child, a family of women are assembled in a house, in a season of mourning, between states of suspension and preparation. Split screens juxtapose fixed and tracking shots of life within this domestic circumscription until, inevitably and gracefully, it is time to move on.
In the collage work Golden Dragon Temple, Lingyung Zheng playfully activates a family archive to bring loved ones back to life. Digitally manipulated photographs and video of the filmmaker’s deceased grandparents are mixed with animation, while re-told stories from their lives interweave with various folk myths in a loving tribute to a previous generation.
More elusive feelings relating to a deceased family member are at play in Derek Jenkins’s quietly devastating As close as your voice can call, in which the filmmaker deploys a series of found materials – footage, sounds, books – in an attempt to connect with his late mother, and locate a language through which a trauma-inflected grief can be navigated.
Grief, trauma, and memory are considered in Tram 嚴敦瓊 Nghiem’s This Line Connects the Void, a delicately abstract account of the artist’s sister’s death, in which the analogue camera silently observes a fragmented family apartment in the absence that emerges in the precarious wake of departure – before that silence too must be broken.
The family home forms the setting for Missed Calls, Wilma Smith’s memorial to her late parents in which she bridges time by placing old family photos and mobile phone video atop the spaces they were originally captured. Voice messages retrieved from the filmmaker’s phone provide the soundtrack to a work both gently humorous and movingly wistful.
