Film Categories: Memory

  • Contents

    An old wallet, abandoned intact, kept for unknown reasons. Uncorroborated memories of a close (but distant) relation. How are these documents speaking to each other? What is the nature of their harmony? Official versus living memory: each useless, unstable, disintegrating. Is memory the bureaucracy of the self? How does it order our lives?

  • wish

    Against the background of the Canadian prairies and the coast of Eastern Canada, wish explores Korean monosyllabic words. While counting to three in Korean, the video explores the multiple meaning of single-syllabic words from one to three that also signify work, labour, profit, etc. Using an observational lens, I documented my retired parents on a trip to the East Coast of Canada. In this video, I explore Canadian landscapes from a diasporic point of view revealing how new narratives emerge when immigrants engage with the Canadian landscape. wish is dedicated to my parents who contributed to the economic fabric of…

  • Officer Tuba Meets Happy Ghost

    soJin Chun combines characters appropriated from two Hong Kong films and digitally rotoscopes them into contemporary Super 8mm film footage shot in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. Pulled from their Hong Kong settings, these characters are recast as Koreans, playing with western perceptions of Asian identity. The ruptures and continuity of culture within diasporic communities frame these figures displaced in time, space, language, and culture. The principal characters in this new film are the titular Officer Tuba (of Where’s Officer Tuba 1986) and an actress taken from the Happy Ghost Franchise (five films 1984-1991). Although they never meet, Chun…

  • Il Raggio Silenzioso / The Silent Ray

    The man’s presence lingers in the room that for years served as his study. Present and past intertwine as he follows threads of his memory and recalls events from the time of his participation in the colonial war against Ethiopia in 1935-36.

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • ghosts

    Ghosts is an experimental video that uses illustration and digitized 8mm film to explore concepts of childhood, sexuality, chrononormativity, indoctrination, and (metaphorical) death. The video disrupts the boundaries of past/present/future, birth/life/death, and humans/ghosts/monsters and encourages a dynamic engagement with such spaces. Ghosts is based on the novel, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, that many children in Canada read in school. The novel centres on a post-apocalyptic future where people, animals and other living forms that present physical differences are ousted to ‘the fringes’ by a strict Christian society. Within that society, a group of children develops a telepathic ability, a…

  • When We Are Nothing Left

    A minimalist film and study about time, infinity and the life cycle, created in the spirit of William Blake.

  • Granular Film – Beirut

    Reminiscence of a trip in Beirut. The sea. the palm trees, the buildings melt when my eyelids began to close. My memories now have a separate life of their own.

  • 10th Frame

    Memories are a confluence of the personal and the collective, the secret and the shared. Shaped by time and space, memories alter perceptions of what is remembered as well as what is forgotten. Pope John Paul II arrived at the Vancouver International Airport on Sept. 18, 1984. Days before his arrival, Transport Canada urged people to stay away, stating that there would be “absolutely no opportunity” to view Pope Paul at the airport. A local reporter at the time remarked that “You’d take 10 frames and you’d never get him, and then suddenly his face would appear between the two…

  • Expo Film (this film is my memory)

    Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo ’67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed. Celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform a mythic landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory. Image description: A Grainy and nostalgic image from an amusement park. A red gondola of a sky ride is in the foreground and crowds and a ferris wheel are in the background.