Who’s the Daddy
:< A Tinder tragedy.
:0 An unexpected child.
;( A journey finding my root of shame.
Punky Eye
Luis Arnías’ enigmatic 16mm film Punky Eye (Ojo Malcriado) is structured into seven different chapters, though any hope of parsing a narrative cohesion from this structure is quickly dashed. A sneaker stepping on a ketchup packet, a mouse running frantically in a metal wheel, seeds being popped out of the head of a flower: sensual and sensory moments build upon one another, with tension and release doled out at unexpected moments. There are scenes of great beauty: a bird with very tired eyes blinks while a recording of Spanish-language absurdist poetry is heard; or a slow motion close-up of a powerful waterfall roars. Other moments show absolute absurdity: a man is forced to stop reading the newspaper when it’s become completely engulfed in flames; a breakfast of Fruit Loops cereal is poured out into a lake, milk and all. Arnías’ sequence of stunningly-shot and surprisingly-edited vignettes results in a strange and alluring film that builds to an ambiguous— but no less affecting—conclusion. —Herb Shellenberger
Confusion Is Next
In Confusion is Next, filmmaker Mont Tesprateep focuses his lens on nomadic musician Thom Assajan-Jakgawan, who appears as a fictionalised version of himself. Living in a fragile state, a collapsed country, Thom solitarily confines himself in a bare room filled with tree branches hovering above a leaf-covered ground. Through meditative exploration—and the loops and layers of his sounds—he creates a powerful mantra of protection.
The ‘real’ Thom Assajan-Jakgawan was— along with Tesprateep—a member of the Thai underground band Assajan Jakgawan. Formed more than a decade ago, the band members have since gone their separate ways, one bandmate sadly passing away. But Thom continues to make music under the name Thom AJ Madson, utilising guitar, mics, loop machines and other objects in his two current projects: Sap (‘bewitched’) and Vimutti, which means ‘liberation’ in the Pali language.
A continuation of Tesprateep’s unique body of surreal, black-and-white 16mm films depicting subjects at the fringes of Thai society, Confusion is Next is inspired by Endel Tulving’s hypothesis on ‘mental time travel’, in which mechanisms of memory can evoke the future. The film’s raw atmosphere, along with its confrontation of different selves and personas, leads toward an ambiguous but still threatening finale. —Herb Shellenberger & Peter Taylor
Medina Wasl: Connecting Town
Medina Wasl: Connecting Town focuses on the role of fiction and simulacrum in the United States Military training sites of the War on Terror. This quasi-documentary connects the current day militarized landscape of the Mojave Desert with that of Shatt al-Arab, a river that was a key military target for the US Military in Iraq. The film shows the perspective of the artist/documentarian/actor, dressed as a teenage Iranian soldier in the war with Iraq and enacting embodied experiences of remembering in the desert.
Not only do the US and its allies continue to dominate, exploit the resources of, and occupy the Middle East, the US practices its strategies in the simulacrum of the Middle East built on stolen Indigenous land in the Mojave Desert. The way the Middle East is constructed here ‘at home’ as a conflation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan—as a malleable placeholder for whatever country we are officially at war with—has its roots in the obvious relationship Timothy Mitchell establishes in Orientalism and The Exhibitionary Order: ‘The nineteenth- century image of the Orient was constructed not just in Oriental studies, romantic novels, and colonial administrations, but in all the new procedures with which Europeans began to organize the representation of the world, from museums and world exhibitions to architecture, schooling, tourism, the fashion industry, and the commodification of everyday life’.
In the context of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the series of world fairs that followed ‘what Arab writers found in the West’, Mitchell argues, ‘were not just exhibitions and representations of the world, but the world itself being ordered up as an endless exhibition. This world-as-exhibition was a place where the artificial, the model, and the plan were employed to generate an unprecedented effect of order and certainty’.