All the Light We Cannot See

A man suspended in the sky; a group of wanderers searching for something amidst the hazy fog; a tribal funeral; a fictional kidnap; a journey looking for the grave of the elder sister submerged in the rice field; a ballet opera-the Red Detachment of Women and Human rap music.

These are scenes and images taken from the works by different artists from the screening program: All the Light We Cannot See. These videos are inspired by their personal life experiences, research on topics such as Asia’s regional history, the violence of nation states and social control. While at the same time they touch on topics like developmentalism, and the domestication and control over the female body.

In terms of styles and techniques, the works selected in the screening are extremely heterogeneous, and display variousforms of experimental cinematic language. For example, Naween Noppakun, who comes from a background being a composer, adopted musical arrangement methods to produce and edit We Love Me. He inserted large amounts of glittery footages taken from Thai melodramatic movies, mixing them with self-shot videos to build the narrative, and in turn created a unique cinematic style. Mao Chen-Yu, a director of documentary films, used diverse materials from Weibo (*Chinese social network), Danmu (*realtime video commenting platform), texts, historic news footage, and documentaries, to construct a critical macroscopic narrative on China’s developmentalism and totalitarian politics. I Hope You Don’t Mind, a story set against the backdrop of a man and woman’s chance encounter at the Hong Kong art fair, was Enoch Cheng’s tribute to the movie Before Sunset. Cinematic works that come close to poetry include Rattana’s Monologue and Charles Lim’s All Lines Flow Out.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe the videos in the screening as a journey. To search for the alive or the dead constitutes individual life stories that voice grievances against state violence. A seemingly real stroll in the city is also an expressive/affective and sarcastic narration critique of the nation and the capitalist system. A fictionalized account of a kidnapping reveals the complex mechanism that employs collective fears as methods of control. Through different cinematic language, these artists sketch out the environment and the complex history in which “me” and “we” reside.