Songs for dying | Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thailand/USA, 30 min, 2021
Songs for dying interweaves histories of death and protest through what anthropologist Seong Nae Kim describes as “the work of mourning”—the memorial activities honoring the forgotten dead that allow for communal healing. The narrating voice of a sea turtle – a revered spirit and descendant of a mythical dragon – tells this story of loss, resistance, and familial love through which Korakrit Arunanondchai’s memories of the last moments spent with his grandfather flow into the life of the forest, Jeju Island’s mythological origins, the legacy of haenyo’s sea farming culture, and their tribute to oceanic living systems. The footage of crowds that marched in protest of the Thai monarchy in 2020 to demand democratic reforms channels distant spirits – invoked in the shamanic rituals commemorating the Jeju uprising of 1948 – with the promise of returning life to the anarchic forces of cosmic waters and ancestral currents. While acts of remembrance unite political struggles that are haunted by the militaristic erasure of restless bodies, throughout the film the songs of ghosts form lineages of unrest and sacred unions that dissolve the contours of life and death through loops of awareness, arriving from decomposition to shores of security.
A Magical Substance Flows into Me | Jumana Manna, Palestine/Germany/UK, 66 min, 2015
A magical substance flows into me opens with a crackly voice recording of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film, Manna follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visit Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. Manna engages them in conversation around their music, while lingering over its history and its current, sometimes endangered, state. Intercutting these encounters with musicians are a series of vignettes of interactions between the artist and her parents in their family home. In a metaphorical excavation of an endlessly contested history, the film’s preoccupations include the complexities embedded in language, desire, and the aural set against the notion of impossibility. Within the hackneyed one-dimensional ideas about Palestine/Israel, this impossibility becomes itself a trope that defines the Palestinian landscape. –NEGAR AZIMI