No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 | Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic (with Tosh Basco), Thailand, 31 min, 2018
Opening with the myth of “Ghost Cinema”, a tradition in North East Thailand that grew out of remnants from the occupation of the US military during the Cold War, Korakrit Arunanondchai weaves together a story about possession and the dependency between the caretaker and the care receiver. The video was mostly shot in Chiang Rai and Udon Thani. In the town of Mae Sai, Chiang Rai, a youth soccer team got trapped in a cave, and their plight became a moment of reframing Thailand and presenting it to the world, as well as back to itself, creating new stories with roles for the helpless, the benevolent, the caregiver and the care-receiver. Spirit mediums, monks, and ghosts of Thailand were there, shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists, the American military, and the international tech-capitalist. In Udon Thani, with the mythical story of the ghosts hiring humans to run an outdoor film screening, the audiences in communion with the ghost, enact a system of rituals through the medium of light projected onto a screen.
–THE MAC BELFAST
あなたの声は私の喉を通った (Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat) | Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 7 min, 2009
“Can our bodies inherit memories of war we have not ourselves experienced? A man who told me about honorable deaths in Saipan he himself witnessed. While listening to him,
I saw him going back to his memory from sixty years ago. He came to a point where, driven to the edge of the Island, his blood relations leapt off the cliff in front of him when he was still young. He could not keep his body from shaking, with tears running from his eyes and nose. Choking on his sobs, he nevertheless went on talking. This made me realize that he was confronting a ferocious memory. It has been said that by 2010 there will be no one left to attest to the Battle of Okinawa based on lived experience. Listening to the testimonies of those who have experienced war, and letting them pass through my body, how can I talk about them in “my own words”? From this perspective, I consider the question of “inheriting” war experiences.“
–CHIKAKO YAMASHIRO
The Cloud of Unknowing | Ho Tzu Nyen, Singapore, 28 min, 2011
The Cloud of Unknowing is titled after a fourteenth century mystical treatise on faith, where the cloud is paradoxically a metaphor for both an impediment to, and reconciliation with, the unknown or the divine experience. Set in a deserted, low-income public housing block in Singapore, the film revolves around eight characters in eight apartments, each in the midst of a solitary activity that brings them into an encounter with a cloud that alternates between being embodied into a figure and as a vaporous mist. In the moment of encounter, a shift, transformation or illumination occurs that, as the medieval text counsels, is effected in a direct experience of the senses instead of being understood with the mind.