Genres: experimental

  • L’Ennui (Les Reves d’un Somnambule)

    “‘L’ennui (Les Reves d’un Somnambule)’ is a film in three segments. The very beginning consists of a three-minute dedication to Universal Leader. Lots of fun… The first section depicts a beautiful old woman floating through states of insomnia and timelessness. The pace is very slow, serene and dreamlike. The second section deals with the frenzy/insanity of the city. By using entire scenes in negative and layering street scenes one on top of the other, Raphael achieves a surreal and frightening eeriness to this section. The last part is not only an ode to human beauty, but it’s also quite humorous…

  • Lion

    A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history. Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl’s adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory. This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations…

  • Shamans, the Cunning

    Referencing mythology and gothic fiction, Shamans, the Cunning is about surviving in evil times. Here, human identity turns fluid and the borderline between human and animal evaporates. Shamans evokes its themes via drama and choreographed movement.

  • PACED

    By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure to comment on how urbanism has divorced its residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty…

  • STILLE.D

    STILLE.D is a meditation on Walter Benjamin’s concepts of ruin (as nostalgia, regret, decay, loss), as well as the paradox of the bourgeois interior constituting both refuge and amplification of the alienating impulses of the city. It plays with the different definitions of “stille” such as stillness, to put (in place), a drop (of liquid), finding a corollary with Stephen Chen’s musical setting of Philip Larkin’s poem.

  • NORTH SOUTH

    Reworking recently rediscovered 15-year-old footage, NORTH SOUTH is a personal and political allegory of freedom and repression in Singapore. It draws an analogy between bipolar-altered reality to life in a prosperous fascist regime (the bridge it was filmed on was a then newly-constructed link between the state university and an army officer camp). NORTH SOUTH was an experiment in the expressiveness of form and rejection of over-determined Hollywood / social realist narrative taught in Singapore. Central to its structure and intent was the foregrounding of typically background elements (montage and music) to explore their expressive potential, as well as the…

  • BROKEN ANGEL (GEBROCHENGEL)

    In Frankfurt near St. Peter’s church on Klaus-Mann-Platz, there is a memorial with an angel sculpture (aka Frankfurter Engel) for the homosexual men and women persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich. 2013 was a tumultuous year for LGBT rights like the spike in hate crimes in the U.S. post-DOMA, and passing of anti-gay legislation worldwide (most notably Russia and India). On 6 May 2013, the anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’s death and 80th year past the Third Reich, Stephen explores the historical and ongoing queer struggle and gilded apology of monuments in a guerilla performance by colliding the Frankfurter Engel…

  • The Incorporated

    THE INCORPORATED is shopping as ritual-a twenty-first century, yet primeval dance. The Incorporated was shot entirely inside mega-malls with a pocket camera, dismissed or unnoticed by security guards and public alike. It is comprised of mass behaviours and intimate unguarded moments between individuals. The ritual is enacted in front of logo texts like Armani, Lacoste, Holt Renfrew, Victoria’s Secret, Banana Republic, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla. No product is ever shown, but we know what those words mean.Outside, the cosmopolis may be divided by class, race and ethnicity. But inside the mega-mall, the diversity of its peoples-commingled-is strangely celebratory.

  • the body of Others

    the body of Others, is an experimental video that engages the tensions between sexuality, identity, visibility, representation and the body, as it relates to queer subjectivity. The video asserts a dynamic relationship between queer subjectivity and the representation of queer identities presented through ideological systems of representation, as performed by the queer body. The video questions the boundaries and distinctions between the visible/invisible, personal/political, private/public, body/technology, human/animal, interior/exterior and normal/other. the body of Others presents a body that is unstable and drifts over itself into space. The body fuses with the unknown and becomes an amalgam of skin, flesh, fur,…

  • Entelechy

    A complex work that portrays three evolutionary states in human development – Physicality (harmony with the environment); Intellectuality (disharmony with the environment); Spirituality (unity with the environment).