Tamone Prai (Savage Jungle)  | Thamrong Rujanaphand, Thailand, 43 min, 1959 

In a coastal town in the south of Thailand, a giant ape nicknamed King Kong terrorizes villagers and abducts a local girl to a forest, prompting a frantic rescue mission by the town sheriff and a fugitive bandit.

Tamone Prai is an example of a regional film made by an amateur filmmaker that was popular in Thailand in the 1950s. Thamrong Rujanaphand shot the 16mm film in the south of Thailand, a predominantly Muslim region with Malay ancestry. The film has a simple, almost naive storyline typical of homemade movies of those days and features scenes that are as humorous as they are likely to raise eyebrows of present-day audiences. However, it also captures the authentic vibe and scenery of Thailand’s south. The film’s central attraction is the giant ape nicknamed King Kong, clearly inspired by the classic film of that title. Thamrong was also an amateur taxidermist, and his skill in creating stuffed creatures was obviously utilised in the film. 

The presence of the hairy big ape invites an array cultural and political interpretations, given the geographical and cultural remoteness of the south from the center. 

*Tamone Prai was presented with Live Dubbing by Cosit Kritanan (Narrator) and Sivapon Phuakpiwiem (Narrator), as well as a Live Musical Performance by Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit (Musician), Teerawat Ukris (Musician),  Kamol Buranakul (Musician), Maneerut Singhanart (Musician) and Jenpijarn Jaturatamrong (Musician).

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.

Tellurian Drama | Riar Rizaldi, Indonesia, 26 min, 2020

May 5th, 1923. The Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of a new radio station in West Java, called Radio Malabar. In March 2020, the local Indonesian government plans to reactivate the station as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tellurian Drama imagines what would have happened in between: the vital role of mountains in history; colonial ruins as an apparatus for geo-engineering technology; and the invisible power of Indigenous ancestors. 

al-Yad al-Kadra (Foragers) | Jumana Manna, Palestine, 64 min, 2022

Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary, and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what 

Death is certain but not final [Performance] | Saeed Taji Farouky, Palestine, 52 min, 2023

Palestinian filmmaker and radical educator Saeed Taji Farouky will take participants through a non-academic, irreverent exploration of “absence” as an essential creative and political component of radical/experimental documentary filmmaking. Journeying through music, literature, dance, film, and architecture in Gaza and Burma, Saeed will examine how certainty, presence, and classification – requirements of capitalist, colonialist, industrial filmmaking – can be challenged and contradicted to devise new forms of cinema able to approach the seeming impossibility of representing genocide. 

having-seen-snake | Sriwhana Spong, USA, 14 min, 2016

Sriwhana Spong filmed having-seen-snake in Pittsburgh, using her encounter with a garter snake as a starting point. The physical and linguistic quality of this experience informs the two different styles explored in the film. In the moment of encountering the snake, Spong’s body responded by intuitively entering into a state of stillness and hyper-sensing—as one creature responding to another. The subsequent (late) arrival of language then brought distinctions and separations. In the first part of the film, a more surreal imprint of place and sensory experience is juxtaposed with the interior of the alcohol house at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. This part centres around a new species of snake recently discovered by herpetologist José Pardial in the Amazon. Spong interviews Pardial, who describes the process of designating a name, and reflects on what it means to transfer something from the unspoken into the realm of the spoken. having-seen-snake ends with the song of the Rothschild’s mynah recorded at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The bird, endemic to Bali, where the artist’s father is from, is currently on the brink of extinction due to poaching. 

Village and Elsewhere Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers | Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Thailand, 20 min, 2011

Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers is shot inside a prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of the video’s single tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons’s work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women – including Araya herself – all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. A figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who, for the duration of the video, delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids. The response of his audience of unruly children and aunties veers between raucous opining and gleefully digressive and associative interpretations of details in the images to chanting enthusiastic replies by rote. Dogs of different sizes wandering off- and on-screen during the unusual sermon, disarraying the loose geometric lines of the tableau. This portrait of improvisatory and participatory spectatorship recalls another genealogy of moving-image exhibition: the live narration of films.

もう一つの教育 伊那小学校春組の記録 (Lessons from a Calf) | Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan, 47 min, 1991

In 1988, Ina Elementary School adopted a cow named Laura from a ranch as a part of the school’s integrated learning program. The children learn subjects such as math, science, and composition from their group activities: building Laura’s barn, calculating the feed cost, debating in class before making decisions about her care, and experiencing essential existential lessons. Capturing the kids’ lively expressions, the documentary witnesses their growth through caring for Laura. This is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film project.

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

A Thousand Fires | Saeed Taji Farouky, France/Switzerland/Netherlands/Palestine, 91 min, 2021

Parents Htwe Tin and Thein Shwe work hard to give their children a better future, their lives governed by a web of karma and astrology. All their hopes are pinned on their youngest son, Zin Ko Aung. When he leaves home to make his own life, his parents must learn to let their children go.

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 Collective (Paijong Laisakul, Surachai Jantimatorn, Euthana Mukdasanit, Rassamee Paoluengthong), 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. 

OKINAWA 墓庭クラブ (OKINAWA Graveyard Club) | Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 6 min, 2004

Captured in black and white, Chikako Yamashiro is in tennis wear dancing in frenzied fashion to club beats in front of a tombstone in broad daylight. As her miniskirt gleams in the dazzling sunlight, a sun visor casts a dark shadow over her face. The video bursts with a vitality that seems to brazenly declare “I will embrace even conflict and wounds and dead, and live with them all.” 

The Class | Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Thailand, 17 min, 2005

The Class is a video work in which Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook lectures corpses about death in what seems to be a kind of classroom. It was filmed in an actual hospital morgue in Chiang Mai, with unclaimed dead bodies playing the role of the six “students” in the class. The work is a performance in which the artist tries to understand death by lecturing the dead about death, with the lecture offering various definitions of death from different perspectives. Araya at times talks directly to the cadavers, encouraging them to share their own views and experiences, and communicating with them in the same way she would with living people. This attitude demonstrates her attempt to confront something that society has overlooked as well as social taboos and cultural discrimination, and the religious and cultural values that involve death (Mori Art Museum). 

Hotel Aporia | Ho Tzu Nyen, Singapore/Japan, 84 min, 2019

Ho Tzu Nyen’s Hotel Aporia features a cast of historical figures from Japan’s interwar period, including World War Two kamikaze pilots, philosophers of the Kyoto School, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and animator Ryuichi Yokoyama. They were all caught up in the heady mix of Japan’s militant nationalism, anti-modernism, and cultural propaganda. Letters and correspondence between the artist and his Japanese collaborators, the writers Tomoyuki Arai and Yoko Nose, form the narrative basis of the work. Experimenting with the epistemological and affective capacities of animation, Ho superimposes animation images of featureless faces onto found footage clips from Ozu’s fiction films and Ryuichi Yokoyama’s animation propaganda films.

This is a single-screen cinematic presentation of Hotel Aporia. Its original form, first presented at the Aichi Trienanle, is a video installation projecting layers of animation and hybrid-animation images onto multiple screens within a heritage building, the kirakutei (inn-restaurant) that had once been the place in which the group of Japanese kamikaze pilots featured in Hotel Aporia had feasted before their final flights. 

土の人 (Mud Man) | Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 23 min, 2017

Migrating birds splat droppings on mud figures lying expressionless on the ground. One man awakens, and tunes in to the words of a poem audible from within the falling matter. The seeds in the bird droppings are made of poetry. The mud people awaken and begin to recite this verse. The man digs a hole with the intention of planting the seed, but falls to the bottom of the hole, as the earth rumbles. There he finds a passage connecting to a time and place in a different dimension, and drawn by the growing sound of gunfire, finds himself in a battleground. A war of past memory looms into view on a screen in mid-air, its light shining on the man. The mud people take on the memories of war shown to them by the seeds. “This is no place to live.” In order to choose the future, they search repeatedly for an alternative way out. Revolutionary “verse” can be heard like tiny breaths of wind in the hole. Through the final exit they arrive at, lilies bloom riotously. The mud people awaken, their hands stretched to the sky, as beautiful as the flowers, and the air resounds with a rhythmic clapping. 

al-Manam (The Dream) | Mohammad Malas, Syria/Palestine, 45 min, 1987

Filmed in 1981-82, The Dream is composed of interviews with Palestinian refugees. Mohamad Malas asks people in the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ain al-Hilweh and Rashidieh in Lebanon about their dreams at night. Gathering the dream testimonies of children, women, old people, and militants, a pattern emerges. The dreams always converge on Palestine: a woman recounts her dreams about winning the war; a fedayeen of bombardment and martyrdom; and one man tells of a dream where he meets and is ignored by Gulf emirs. During filming, Malas lived in the camps and conducted interviews with more than 400 people. In 1982, the Sabra and Shatila massacres occurred, taking the lives of several people he interviewed, and he stopped working on the project. He returned to it in 1986 and edited the many hours of footage gathered into this 45 minute film, released in 1987.

And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree | Sriwhana Spong, UK, 5 min, 2022

And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree animates the insects found in the last painting by Sriwhana Spong’s grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu. Painted in the traditional Kamasan style, unusual for him, it depicts a battle scene from the Bhomantaka: The Death of Bhoma, a twelfth-century Javanese epic by an unknown author. These insects can be found in the white spaces between the warring figures, where, mosquito like, they function like the small motifs called aun-aun or “haze” found in nearly all the traditional schools, which represent dust particles in the air. 

In the painting, Made Rundu appears to have transformed the traditional aun-aun motif into insects. The film animates these insects, producing a swarm that follows the artist’s voice as she recites a circular, looping text formed from a section of the Bhomāntaka that describes a hermitage left in ruins after a battle. As one of the lines laments: “The circle has been broken and destroyed.” Her grandfather’s insects are animated as a swarm, imaging ancestry not as a linear succession but as an accumulation of energy, as a vibration full of shimmering diversions “charged with potentiality". 

Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 | Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thailand, USA, 25 min, 2015

Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 is the epilogue to a trilogy of videos Arunanondchai began in 2012. In the video, Arunanondchai revisits his past times spent with Chantri, the main character of the trilogy who we never see – the incarnation of the in-between space in communication that is part spirit and part drone. For the first time in the trilogy, Chantri speaks back to the artist, through the voice of his mother, Chutatip Arunanondchai. The dialogue between the two characters amounts to a closure for the series as they string together fragments of personal and collective experiences that touches on the issue of memory lost in the digital age, the fluctuating 

The 49th Hexagram | Ho Tzu Nyen, Singapore/South Korea, 30 min, 2020

The 49th Hexagram explores the construction of cultural memory and political narrative surrounding the history of the Korean peninsula. Employing the services of an animation studio in Pyongyang, North Korea, Ho Tzu Nyen’s work reinterprets scenes of political uprising and mass demonstration as depicted in South Korean narrative film and television. The project aims to form a direct relationship between South Korea’s political  history and the tensions that still define the country’s relationship with its northern counterpart. The result is, in the artist’s words, a “game of exquisite corpse across geopolitical barriers.” The artist developed the experimental soundtrack in collaboration with Korean artists and musicians Bek Hyunjin, Park Minhee, and Ryu Hankil. Offering two vocal renditions of texts from the forty-ninth hexagram of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual, the soundtrack composites historical interpretation with translation to speak of revolution and renewal.

This is a single-channel cinematic presentation of The 49th Hexagram, whose original form is a two-channel video and sound installation.

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 

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.

Painted Earth  | Lawan Jirasuradej, USA/Thailand, 7 min, 1994 

Lawan Jirasuradej’s independent 16mm shorts, Painted Earth, were created during her Fulbright graduate scholarship study at San Francisco State University's School of Cinema. Painted Earth is among a handful of Thai experimental films made by independent filmmakers in the 1990s, and its combination of poetic images and narration brings together the two worlds of sound and picture, of the USA and Thailand.

Birth of the Seanema | Sasithorn Ariyavicha, Thailand, 70 min, 2004

Birth of the Seanema is a silent black-and-white tone poem shot on DV. It is a hypnotic experience that gives a completely new meaning to the concept of inertia. In the film, the sea is the place where all memories of every being and of all things stay. From this all-encompassing memory, images appear entwined with a story about a lost city. The memories of the city’s dwellers, their dreams and their emotions enter into vulnerable links. For the film maker, the sea is not just a metaphor. Her love of the sea is also concrete, as is her love of moving images.