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As the journey starts, wide empty landscapes make one wonder what one is looking for. A mysterious object? A crime scene? Something horrifying? The scenes are getting more and more specific, but they do not lead to any concrete solution—only an injury in place of a metaphor. —Nguyễn Trinh Thi
Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet.
A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman—recalling the stillness of photographs. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze.
Informed by principles of psychogeography and human ecology, this non-verbal film suggests a mournful narrative involving humans and the nocturnal and crepuscular landscapes they inhabit.
This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.
At the centre of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed.
The condition of distance, genetic to the ethnographic image, traces the elusive qualities of Samarasinghe’s mother’s past and persona as a woman of partial Chinese heritage.
In a village in central India, dedicated school teachers put their heart and soul into preparing a group of children for an entrance exam for a Government-run “School of Excellence.” Entrance Exam explores the stakes of the opportunities afforded by this continued, subsidised education for underprivileged children, as well as the many layers of struggle in this intense and surprising journey.
Fifth Cinema begins with a quiet statement “I am a filmmaker, as you know.” That text and what follows, by Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay, who coined the term ‘Fourth Cinema’ to distinguish Indigenous cinema from the established ‘First, Second, and Third Cinema’ framework, provides structure to Nguyễn’s hybrid essay film that moves on multiple cinematic and topical terrains. Eschewing voice in favour of the written word and juxtaposing moving images of the filmmaker’s own daughter with archival images of Vietnamese women seen through the lens of the “ship’s officers”, the film slowly leads the viewer through a narrative of colonialism, indigeneity and cinematic limitations in representation. —Nguyễn Trinh Thi
Hailstorm is based in the Narmada valley in central India, an area with extremely low levels of groundwater. Farmers here battle for survival, pitched against the vagaries of climate change. Following the events of a freak hailstorm over four seasons, the film unfolds the vulnerability and precarity of those that are at the sharpest end of global capitalism’s rapacious greed and the furthest from its benefits. —Jemma Desai
