by april forrest lin 林森
In shorts programme Your Body Has Never Been Your Own, six films situate struggle and survival within the strictures and structures of the state apparatus.
Friday Dreams, by the collective Harrotu ileak in collaboration with Zine-Lab, ponders, processes, and expresses what it means to migrate and to cross borders only to find yourself precarious and unwelcome at your destination. In a polyvocal series of tender vignettes and playful reenactments, the group poignantly dismantles the illusion of the European dream, forging bonds of companionship in the making. Maya Jeffereis’s Land of Eternal Summer is a multilingual examination of Japanese migration to Brazil during the early 1900s, reactivating archive materials through a poetics of critical fabulation and colour inversion. Experiences of structural discrimination clash against footage of verdant abundance both past and present, as phytograms imprint ghostly traces against diasporic proclamations of enduring nation-state allegiance.
Hiding Places by Magdalena Bermudez examines the co-option of formal art education by military logics, with women artists recruited as soldiers to serve as camoufleurs. Gradually, the techniques of looking and representing used in realistic drawing become leveraged as tools of camouflage, pattern recognition, and detection. Escalating into a thriller, the film follows a deserter who utilises her recent training in disappearance to refuse handing over her sketches. In Emma McIntyre’s Did I Feel It?, the experience of hiding and being hidden is reworked by laying bare the invisibilised aspects of being disabled: the haze and fog of crip time, the removal of body parts during surgery, the time spent attuning and reattuning one’s sense of self. Low resolution, blown out digital video, often layered and handheld, communicates a shifting and partial visibility while affording an intimate diaristic perspective into the filmmaker’s shades of embodiment.
Lilan Yang’s Untitled Film Disinfection Project I applies hydrogen chloride and sodium chlorite – the chemical solution prescribed by the mainland Chinese government as part of its 2022 zero-COVID policy – to 100 feet of image-less Ektachrome film, developed but unexposed. The resulting markings, organic and unpredictable in nature, subvert the language and symbolism of sanitisation as enacted through state control while offering a filmic analogy to the role of abstraction in the refusal and circumvention of censorship. In The Rabbit Always Dies by Oona Taper, a textured collage of animation and found footage examines the scientific development of pregnancy tests during the 1930-60s, specifically its dependence on the use of live frogs and rabbits. Eerily playful and vibrantly haunting, the film’s cacophony of anthropomorphic animal characters plunges us into the everyday horrors of interspecies entanglements and the enduring effects of this medical invention.
