Program 8

Short film program consisting of VS, YAROKAMENA, and DEVIL’S PEAK

Total running time approx. 59 min.

vs

VS (or “virtual spiral”) deals with the dynamics between time and body in film. On digital video and expired 16mm film the processual nature of time and (film) body is visually transformed by spiraling camera movements. Contrary movements, distance, and proximity or depth and surface enter into a dialogue with each other. The spiral runs like a thread through the film. To create the spiraling effect, Lydia Nsiah invented a camera tracking machine and shot in studio, operating the movements of the camera live while recording. On screen we see found footage of data centers—recordings of the physical bodies of our omnipresent data cloud. Hui Ye composed the film’s immersive sound space interacting with the hypnotic and spiraling data body images.

Yarokamena

This is the story of YAROKAMENA, a Uitoto indigenous person who organized armed resistance to rubber exploitation at the beginning of the 20th century in Casa Arana, Colombia. He invokes the spiritual and cosmic forces of war, releasing its destructive power from its container that ends up creating a spiral of betrayal and death.
This remarkable tale was banned by traditional authorities for its potential to attract young people to revolt and function as a stimulus to resort to witchcraft. It is here told by Gerardo Sueche, councilor of the Uitoto peoples, going through film portraits of a delirious Amazon, invaded by technological ruins, dysfunctional antennas, ghost ships, and colonial ghosts housed in the oral memory of the survivors of this episode of exploitation and extractivism. Cinema is a new container for this destructive force.

Devil’s Peak

DEVIL’S PEAK reflects on recent unprecedented shifts in the socio-cultural fabric of the artist’s homeland of Hong Kong and a nagging anxiety that hangs over daily life in the former British Colony. Highly condensed glimpses of cityscapes and everyday life form a collage of overlapping poetic narratives and coded references. The film cycles through ominous sites of social tension, lush urban spectacle, relics of imperialist legacies, and places of personal significance—such as the artist’s 500-year-old ancestral village—at a rapid, frenetic pace. By interrogating highly subjective experiences in the context of a seemingly insurmountable change in the political and cultural fabric of his native city, Liu creates a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.