Sequences of Our Time

The memory of violence extends across these two films by Harun Farocki and Lav Diaz. Aufschub meticulously examines the footage shot by Rudolf Breslauer at the Westerbork refugee camp in the Netherlands, a place of transit set up for the Jewish and Romani people who were deported to death camps in the east. Farocki’s film-making always keeps a distanced and critical view in relation to the image and the symbolic violence it is capable of inflicting, with the German director analysing in this film the images retrieved from Westerbork to present them to the viewer with renewed force. The film Walang alaala ang mga paru-paro, meanwhile, zooms in on a community on the remote island of Marinduque, in the Philippines, which remains stranded in time following the closure of a mine a few years previously, when the Canadian multi-national company that operated it left. A group of unemployed islanders remember bygone days of economic prosperity, ignoring the natural disaster the company was causing in the territory. The situation shifts with the visit of one of the female descendants of the former owners of the mine, who, arriving from Canada, sparks violence on the island. As with the rest of Philippine film-maker Lav Diaz’s filmography, this work investigates the social, economic and political circumstances in the Philippines, dissecting the problems facing a community ensnared in post-colonial dilemmas.

The two films in this session work as two opposing mirrors showing the contrast between city and jungle. In Kyoshin, an actress going through a profound identity crisis is progressively captivated by images of a tropical paradise shown on the screens pervading the city of Tokyo. The malaise of contemporary life in large cities, so-called “civilisation sickness”, is a recurring theme in the films of Japanese director Gakuryu Ishii, who, in this instance, explores forms of resistance in these modern environments: for the protagonist of the film, the screens offer a utopian space, a form of escapism towards another place and time. Conversely, in Worldly Desires Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul films two moments in the depths of the jungle: during the day, two lovers flee from their families in search of a spiritual tree, while at night a group of women stage a romantic song about the search for happiness. Throughout the work, the jungle represents a liminal space, a world of hidden dreams and desires inhabited by spirits and mysterious creatures. As the director explains: “The jungle reveals true emotions as it becomes a kind of landscape of the imagination. Sometimes it is a character. Sometimes also a stage”.

The first works produced within the Jeonju Digital Project framework place the stress on the arrival of digital and on the opportunities this new technology could offer. Therefore, this session is structured around digital and related themes, for instance the performativity of identity and desire in a digitised world. Rosalinda is the first of a series of adaptations of William Shakespeare comedies that film-maker Matías Piñeiro frames within an Argentinean and contemporary context. On a hot afternoon on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a group of young actors rehearse the work As You Like It. At the same time, the performers reproduce the strategies of courtship conducted by characters from the comedy. Correspondances, by French film-maker Eugène Green, narrates the epistolary exchange between two young people by email, where a computer keyboard replaces paper and pen — an exchange that addresses themes such as transcendental love and communication. Finally, Digitopia shows a man stuck between analogue and digital worlds, a person who works in the first but seeks pleasure in the second. Interested in the emotional background of the digital revolution, the British film-maker of Ghanaian origin, John Akomfrah, has also developed his ideas on new technology and its possibilities in a project on film’s decolonisation, in the essay “Digitopia and the Spectres of Diaspora” (Journal of Media Practice, vol. 11, no. 1, 2010).

The two films that make up this session deal with the main characters’ negotiation with the past and present, times which are constantly interweaving, and for whom tradition is a powerful and severe force. The filmography of Japanese director Naomi Kawase, straddling “real cinema” and “auteur cinema”, is shaped by an exploration of intimate and emotional life, and by issues such as absence, the need to be gazed at and the constant approach to and rejection of home territory. Her work Koma is immersed in forests and the Nara Basin in Japan via the figure of a visitor who arrives at a family house at the foot of the Miwa sacred mountain to return a Buddhist scroll given to his grandfather years before. This posthumous duty leads him to meet the woman of the house, with whom he holds a profound exchange. In Gyeo-wul-ba-me, by South Korean film-maker Jang Woo-jin, a middle-aged couple embark upon, thirty years after their first encounter, a night-time journey through the temple of Cheongpyeong, in the city of Chuncheon. In their meanderings, encounters occur with past characters which evoke regret, doubt and the erosion of the affection that underlies the day-to-day of the married couple. In short, a drama about the future of relationships which also approximates the style South Koran film-maker Hong Sang-soo.

Lives in transit, forced migration flows, damages inflicted by globalising processes under the neoliberal regime, and experiences of African diaspora, particularly post-colonial masculinities, are the strands entwining these three works, which travel from Africa to the Americas and Europe. In Expectations, by Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a man is pressured to embark on a dangerous journey through the desert and find passage to Europe, where he must see how he can pay off the debts his father incurred to fund a previous, unsuccessful attempt at migration. The film explores debt as a violent imposition stemming from agitated dynamics between fathers and sons in post-colonies, within a context of conflict and precarity. In A caça ao coelho com pau, meanwhile, Pedro Costa returns to the characters and settings of some of his best-known films. Ventura, an elderly migrant from Cabo Verde, remembers his family and past jobs in the company of other men who live in the Fontaínhas slum in Lisbon. The Portuguese film-maker thus reflects on the problems of gentrification and marginalisation in the urban environment, as well as the growing inequality in the country over recent decades. Finally, in Aller au diable French director Claire Denis travels to the border between Guyana and Suriname to meet the owner of mining operations there. This controversial figure acts as leader of the Aluku tribe, the descendants of runaway slaves who managed to escape from the Dutch exploiters and live for four hundred years secluded in forests.

Samsara travels between fiction and documentary, between Laos and Zanzibar, between the material and spiritual universe, diluting its borders. Drawing from the Bardo Thodol, known in the West as “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, Galician film-maker Lois Patiño focuses on saṃsāra: the cycle of birth, life, death and reincarnation. With its minimal narrative, the film is structured into two parts, starting in a community of Buddhist monks in Laos and continuing in a small village on the coast of Zanzibar, following the passing of a being to incarnate the next one. In-between, the viewer is invited to close their eyes and let themselves be led by light and sound stimuli to form their own images. The filmography of Patiño, a film-maker from the so-called novo cinema galego (New Galician Cinema), underscores the dissolving of subjects in the landscape and, following this working strand in the film, completely blurs that which separates humans from animals and objects, referring to the visual, tactile and sensual qualities of the world understood as a canvas.

Chilean film-maker Camila José Donoso films and re-imagines her anarchist grandmother, Josefina Ramírez, or ‘Nona’, via different registers, from the photochemical format to digital, revealing a multifaceted image full of nooks, nuances and contrasts. The film explores the story that forced the protagonist into exile to the coastal town of Pichilemu, on the Pacific, where strange forest fires begin to break out. The fire that spreads through the community is also the fire Nona harnessed as a guerrilla during the years of military dictatorship, and the inner fire symbolising the act of defiance, transgression, disobedience and objection. In this feature-length film, moving between the intimate and the political, the director looks to eschew conventions when it comes to representing family memory and first-person accounts. “I think we see ‘old age’ as we see Nona […] governing her own life and most importantly enjoying it, as an act of protest”.

In A Letter from Hiroshima, Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa sends a letter to Korean actress Ho-Jung Kim to invite her to Hiroshima to work on a film. However, when the actress arrives in Japan she is told that the director cannot attend the meeting and that, instead, he wants her to explore the city on her own. Using archive images, the film reflects on the legacy of the atomic bomb in the city, as well as the traces of violence inflicted on Korea during Japanese colonial rule. The Great Cinema Party, for its part, by Philippine film-maker Raya Martin, starts with a broad prologue made up of recovered images from the naval battles in the War of the Pacific and the bombings of Manila during the Second World War. On Corregidor Island, an old fortress of the United States army during the war, a group of foreigners gather in a mansion housing film relics and artefacts from another time. As night falls, they hold a big party, also bringing together recognisable figures from Philippine cinema, and when the film theatre is enveloped in darkness in the final minutes, the music flows beyond all conversation and the collective experience takes over any other attempt to give form.

These two films, despite foregrounding problems related to our relationship with the memory of tragedy and trauma, provide a glimmer of hope on the possibilities of cinema as a space of thought, encounter and memory, where the past is not something that can be erased and is in fact the opposite, constantly bursting forth into the arc of the present through images.