
Blessed Blessed Oblivion | Jumana Manna, Palestine, 21 min, 2011
Blessed Blessed Oblivion weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the video uses visual collage and the musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects, leather-clad bikers, serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray, that of stereotyped male “thug” culture in Palestine. Close-up fragments construct an eroticised and parodic montage of bodies, cars, and places, intersected by snippets of dialogue and a monologue about the art of a car wash. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry and unashamed self-praise.

I Like Okinawa Sweet | Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 7 min, 2004
Leaning over a fence surrounding a U.S. military base, a woman is happily eating ice cream someone gave her. Spectators who know the status quo of Okinawa will realize that the ice cream symbolizes both a promotion policy in compensation for the accepted bases and an image of tourism, unilaterally imposed. Chikako Yamashiro plays the role of the woman herself. Simultaneously, the ice-cream eating woman is playing the role of the people in Okinawa, who have little choice but to exist in such a reality. Through this simulation, I Like Okinawa Sweet embodies the present tense experience of the local culture’s disappearance, the transformation of Okinawa into tourist attractions, and its rapid homogenization.

ทองปาน (Tongpan) | Isan Film Group (Paijong Laisakul, Surachai Jantimatorn, Euthana Mukdasanit, Rassamee Paoluengthong and others), Thailand, 60 min, 1977
Tongpan begins with an encounter between a male student activist and the eponymous peasant in a communist insurgency zone during the Cold War. The student travels from Bangkok to northeast Thailand to scout for villagers who can be persuaded to come to the city to talk about their precarious existence. He befriends Tongpan and persuades him to make the journey to join a seminar. The film then re-enacts a seminar that had taken place in real life, intended to bring different stakeholders to the table to discuss the likely consequences of a dam-building project along the Mekong River. Yet, rather than narrating a process of democratic deliberation, these reenactment scenes portray Tongpan’s alienation and exclusion. The student vanguards, bureaucrats, and academics dominate the discussion. Tongpan and two other male peasants find themselves seated at the grand table only to furnish the tableau of participation.
Tongpan was a fugitive film made by a group of Thais and Americans who had never before made a film. The group – journalist, researcher, writer, dramatist, musician, and activist – were energised to experiment with making a 16mm film to tell this self-critical story within the climate of radicalisation after the fall of the military dictatorship in Thailand in 1973. Tongpan was not yet completed when the 1976 anti-communist massacre took place at Thammasat University. Most of the reels of raw footage had already been shipped to a lab in Hong Kong for processing, which made it possible to try to finish the film elsewhere. Paijong Laisakul, who was quietly acting as the primary creative and organisational force within the group, later completed the film during her brief period of exile in Sweden.