Program 5

Short film program consisting of FIRE EMERGENCIES, PARASITE FAMILY, MAJMOUAN, and ONE BIG BAG

Total running time approx. 63 min.

Fire Emergencies

FIRE EMERGENCIES is firefighter Derron Everson stating the most requested emergencies in the city of Columbus Ohio.

Parasite Family

PARASITE FAMILY is constructed from old film negatives discovered in an out-of-business film lab. Using analog and digital editing techniques, Prapat Jiwarangsan breathes new energy into these old films. He accompanies them on their journey from the world of analog to the world of digital, and finally to the world of AI-generated images and NFT artworks. Suggesting that these faces represent a certain kind of family that is parasitic on Thai society—the kind of families and institutions that absorb wealth and power—they gradually evolve into a new species of monsters.

Majmouan

Do you keep an account of your gray hairs? Of the number of houses you have owned or rented? Of the number of kisses you have exchanged? Of the number of times you’ve flown in dreams? You may not have. It makes no real difference in a life lived beyond numbers. 
MAJMOUAN (Subtotals) is an essay film about an accounting never being applied to one’s life’s products. Inspired by a short story of the same title by Gregory Burnham and the novel “Autoportrait” by Édouard Levé, and wholly composed of 8mm home movies of Iranian people, Majmouan is a meditation on the uncertainties of a life that doesn’t hand you any bills.

One Big Bag

A millennial death doula introduces us to the world of end-of-life care. With a matter-of-fact demeanor and intense physicality, she guides us into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care—practical, political, and spiritual. She performs her knowledge within a field of props that are the tools of her trade, kept in a “mobile corpse kit”—everyday items that she manipulates to profound use. The film, drawn from workshops, research, and interviews conducted with several end-of-life doulas from different cultural backgrounds, is a skill share, threaded with humor, grief, unknowing, and a desire for justice. The doula’s work encourages us to turn towards that which we strive so hard to avoid.