
a hook but no fish | Sriwhana Spong, UK, 25 min, 2017
A hook but no fish explores the Lingua Ignota (unknown language) received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Sriwhana Spong’s film begins at Disibodenberg in Germany, in the ruins of the monastery where the child Von Bingen was given as a tithe to the Church. The film moves from her place of internment, where she first began to write, to the desktop of an unknown narrator, to the living room of a flat, to a farmhouse, to scenes of birds swarming and roaming through streets in London and Rotterdam. This vertiginous time travel is accompanied by a score composed by Aotearoa musician Frances Libeau. A hook but no fish speculates whether the Lingua Ignota is a prophetic language for an arid time such as our own, where rivers run dry, species become extinct, and only technology and tools survive, and asks what Von Bingen’s act of renaming the things in her world with green-sampling words might bring about.

Kasiterit | Riar Rizaldi, Indonesia, 18 min, 2019
One-third of the global tin supply is extracted from Bangka island in Indonesia. Tin is an essential part of 21st century technological expansion. It’s used to make digital devices such as mobile phones, and component parts of artificial intelligence or renewable energy. In Riar Rizaldi’s Kasiterit, Natasha is a solar-powered AI voice. They narrate the film, tracing their genealogy and the truth of their origin. Natasha speaks on a range of pressing topics for this century, including capital liquidity and labour. They narrate the emergence of tin in Bangka island, and talk about their existence from the perspective of tropical anthropology of nature, value theory, philosophy of time, genetic mutation, geopolitics, and automation.

チンビン・ウェスタン 家族の表象 (Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family) | Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 32 min, 2019
The stereotypical roles of men and women in the Western genre become more complex in Chikako Yamashiro’s Chinbin Western, set in Okinawa. The film is structured in such a way that two family narratives are performed in two settings with different actors. There is a sacred site near the mine and the village where the two families live, enshrining a “heavenly boat” that legend says carried ancestors to the village after they were nearly lost at sea. One day, the grandfather and grandchild from the first family notice that this “heavenly boat” has disappeared. Another day, when the father from the second family opens the window curtain, unfamiliar people are present at the mine. The setting of the story changes to the distant past, with two village ancestors appearing in traditional Ryukyu costume. One of them has come back to the village after some time and is amazed that the mine has become a desolate place and the “heavenly boat” has disappeared. Meanwhile, another who has been living in the village continuously responds that digging up the earth was the only way for people to support themselves. This conflict berween the two echoes that of of the two families living today.