Open Programme II : Light Dissolves

07:00 min /sound
Nayra Sanz Fuentes, Spain

Shadows are not always under the earth.

04:22 min / sound
Andrew Stiff and Junya Nishimura, Vietnam

As part of a research project investigating the hems [alleyways] of district 4, this output is using moving image sequences to understand the intimate and ordinary details of an endangered and unique urban habitat. District 4 is located next to the centre of Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon. Its proximity belies the fact that it is a city within a city, made up of many alleyways that provide everything the residents and visitors need. This film is part of a larger project of many films, and artworks, which are being collated into an archive.

07:00 min / sound
Bryony Dunne, Canada/Ireland/Egypt

This film explores the advancement of the colonial project with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 – wherein flora, fauna and human beings were uprooted and transferred across multiple continents — and highlights a sinister, even surreal, pattern of domination. Found footage and photographs of botanical and zoological gardens, natural history museums and world fairs are intricately woven with the artist’s own photographic series on Egypt’s 125-year-old Giza Zoo.

05:55 min / sound
Talha KK and Tsa Meera, Malaysia

“Garis” in Malay means ‘line’, “وقت” (pronounced as ‘Waqt’) in Urdu means ‘time’. “Garisوقت” (Timeline) is derived from the lives of two people belonging to different origins as well as different artistic mediums; of film (Talha KK) and art (Tsa Meera), combined together with their personalities and conveyed as an experimental film. The concept of “Garisوقت” is to portray the communication of two individuals which happens during the timeline of the filmmaking process, which goes parallel with their feelings, psyche, past, current and future lives.

04:18 min / sound
Ng Seow Mun and Liew Jing Ying, Malaysia

Individuals with different facial expressions are seen. Each of them seems to have their own issues that are not being told nor understood. When tension arises to an unbearable point, some might want a way out. This work is a contemplation on the increasing cases of teen suicides cases nowadays.

08:45 min / sound
Matthew Sansom, Malaysia/ United Kingdom

“The name Moses … means, taken from the water, and so shall we be taken out of instability, rescued from the storm of the world-flow.” Meister Eckhart. Using imagery of reflections on the surface of water and sounds from above and beneath it, this audio-visual work is an expression of Eckhart’s ‘storm of the world-flow’ and of how spiritual practice can be understood to modulate its ‘instability’. It is a translucent suggestion of process: change amid stasis, progressive cyclical transformation, interplay of form – seen/unseen, known/unknown.

01:30 min / sound
Michael Lyons, Japan

The film is shot on 16mm film using a 35mm SLR and developed in Matchanal – home-brewed with powdered green tea, vitamin C and washing soda. It was filmed at the Ryoanji dry landscape garden in northwest Kyoto. This short film is part of an ongoing series of digital video loops based on segments of hand-processed 16mm film. Various techniques are used to make the loops: patterned tape is attached to clear leader; 16mm film is used in 35mm and medium format cameras; expired film is hand-processed.

03:19 min / sound
Low Pey Sien, Malaysia

‘Keroncong Kuala Lumpur’ (1968), a song by P. Ramlee that expresses hope and aspirations for Kuala Lumpur as the capital of Malaysia at the time. On the other hand, this work reinterprets the rhythm of Kuala Lumpur with recorded sound of typewriter and image montage of Razak Mansions flats which is demolished to make way for development.

0:48 min / sound
Kun Ieng Ieong, Macau/ China

There’s a saying that the shape of Casino Lisboa in Macau is like a birdcage, it is a Feng Shui element to trap whoever enters. The entire Macau is indeed like a big birdcage where people inside seem difficult to get out. Dazzling light makes the birds in the golden birdcage hyperactive even at night. With the nonstop neon lights, they become insensitive and losing its natural instincts. The birds are sitting elegantly, singing the song of harmony, but they’ve forgotten what is happiness and what is sadness. Being in the cage for a long time, they forget how to fly. They forget that they are birds.

05:00 min / sound
Muhamad Nur Iman Syamil Bin Mohd Fouzee, Malaysia

Nasi Lemak Hipster is about a culture that is being destroyed by its own people, where they take in every influence that is bombarded to them without critical considerations, in hope to be fashionable and trendy.

07:15 min / sound
Muhammad Reza, Indonesia

The history of the state has always been formulated by the government or historians. The people are just following what has been said by the government in books or other media about the country. In Indonesia, especially in the new order, the image of the state that appears to the public is always perfect because the mass media is fully controlled by the state. The film attempts to show how the millennial generation that only gets information about the new order from school history books, trying to formulate itself about the state of this country in that era through the pieces of film produced in that era.