The Sojourn

Tiffany Sia / 2023 / USA, Taiwan / 32’ / Digital / Mandarin Chinese spoken, English subtitles

“The Sojourn imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. He advises on the perfect conditions of mist and weather. Yet, in the journey through the mountains of Hehuanshan, the sublime landscape of King Hu remains ever elusive. Absent of conventional subtitles, the essay film employs text burned into the centre of the frame as a mode of translation, sometimes refusing total disclosure.” (Tiffany Sia)

A Stone’s Throw ( على مرمى حجر )

Razan AlSalah / 2023 / Canada / 40’ / Digital / Arabic and English spoken, English subtitles  

Amine, a twice-exiled Palestinian elder, becomes a figure around whom AlSalah unravels the recurring violence of oil and labour extraction. The story of his displacements, from Haifa to Beirut and again to Zirku Island, an Emirati offshore oil platform and work camp, intersects with the region’s histories of extraction and colonisation, with the 1936 sabotage of a British Petroleum pipeline by Palestinian labourers being a critical event. AlSalah incorporates satellite imagery and archival material into her footage to serve as a form of digital trespass against the borders imposed upon the region by those who occupy and regulate it to lay out the emotional and material proximities shared across the area. 

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