Colonial history isn’t just a thing of the past. It shapes our memories and knowledge in the present; how we remember and what we know (and can know). A history that normalizes and obscures destruction and exploitation through official, hegemonic narratives must be revised from the perspective of postcolonial cultural productions: cultural works that broaden and reimagine the scope of what we can see, understand, and articulate, and how we relate to each other.
Highlighting such works is the aim of the film series Decolonial Visions in Diaspora Cinema. It sheds light on the Asia-Pacific region as one of the previously overlooked sites of various, overlapping forms of colonialism.
The focus is on works by Asian-diasporic filmmakers who, from within the ambivalence of being part of a diaspora, meaning being both part of and in conflict with homogenizing national-ethnic and patriarchal-heteronormative identity politics – present alternatives to mainstream colonial knowledge. Through their playful and sometimes risky approach, they break down genre categories and center marginalized knowledge.
In four screenings and subsequent discussions with the filmmakers, diaspora is negotiated as a condition of possibility for critical-creative, decolonial memory work and cultural practice.
Highlight
At all four screenings, filmmakers will be present, in person or online, to the subsequent film discussion.
Programme
Shireen Seno, Philippines, 2018, 90 min. Tagalog with English subtitles, digital
The screening will be followed by a talk with Shireen Seno.
Late 1988, post-dictatorship Philippines. Eight year-old Yael, shy to a fault, lives in her own private world. Left to her own devices while her mother assembles shoes at the local shoe factory, Yael cooks miniature meals for herself, sometimes forgetting about leftovers for dinner in the fridge. In the evenings, she cuts her mother’s white hair for 25 centavos a strand while they watch soap operas on television. Yael only knows her father through his voice through letters in the form of cassette tapes which he sends back every now and then from Saudi Arabia. Their boombox sometimes ‘eats tape’, but this does not stop Yael from secretly listening to Father’s voice letters. One night, she accidentally records over a voice tape meant for her mother. (SJC + FMH)
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, India, 2019, 38 min. Kannada with English subtitles, digital
An Asian Ghost Story
Bo Wang, Hong Kong, Netherlands, 2023, 37 min. Cantonese, English with English subtitles, digital
The screening will be followed by an talk with Sindhu Thirumalaisamy and Bo Wang (online)
The Lake and the Lake orients to the ‘toxic commons’ around a polluted urban lake in Bangalore, India. Drawing connections between the landscape image, hyper-development, environmentalism and xenophobia, the film asks: what constitutes a ‘nature’ worth protecting? Departing from a 1965 United States embargo on the hair trade known as the “Communist Hair Ban”, An Asian Ghost Story traces the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization. (SJC + FMH)
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy is an artist and filmmaker whose work responds to spatial and narrative processes of enclosure. Her films, installations, writing, and sound compositions seek a cinematic language of ecological resistance and care.
Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Amsterdam. He works mostly with video, film and installation.
Yin Q, Yoon Grace Ra (USA/Australia 2023, 78min)
Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2022, OmE, 20min
Hundsstern steigt ab
Aykan Safoglu, 2021, OmE, 12min
The screening will be followed by a talk.