Personal Archives of Home
This program of short works—including experimental works from a first-person perspective, documentary pieces, found footage decoupages, or combinations of all of the above—considers the manner in which migration impacts and reshapes cultural identity and memory, offering a diversity of ruminations on the Asian diasporic experience. Includes Rea Tajiri’s "History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige," reflecting upon her family’s experience in the Japanese internment camps of World War II; Suneil Sanzgiri’s "At Home But Not at Home," a stylistically freewheeling meditation on Goan independence as placed in a larger international context; Simon Liu’s "Signal 8," an enigmatic, fragmented portrait of everyday life in Hong Kong; and more. Together, these films trace a diversity of perspectives, intimate, archival, and transnational, on the Asian diasporic experience, and how home becomes something remembered, reinvented, and reimagined across borders.
-
At Home But Not At Home
Directed by Suneil Sanzgiri | 11 mins | 2019
Combining excerpts from India’s Parallel Cinema movement, 16mm drone footage, and family Skype interviews, Sanzgiri’s film recounts an unorthodox history of various interlocked anti-colonial liberation movements as seen at a mediated distance, using hi... -
DROGA!
Directed by Miko Revereza | 8 mins | 2014
The debut work of Manila-born filmmaker Miko Revereza, whose features "No Data Plan" (2019) and "Nowhere Near" (2023) reflect on his experience as an undocumented resident in the United States, this 8mm short—comprising a repeated shot of a singer and a c... -
Disintegration 93-96
Directed by Miko Revereza | 5 mins | 2017
As timely now as it was upon first release, this intimate essay film—a patchwork of self-portraiture and home-movie footage overlaid with the filmmaker’s voice-over—finds Revereza reflecting upon his childhood relocation from the Philippines to California... -
Will You Look At Me
Directed by Shuli Huang | 20 mins | 2022
Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes 2022, Shuli Huang’s evocative Super 8 confessional tracks the queer filmmaker’s return to his hometown of Beijing and the ensuing conversation with his mother, long disapproving of her son’s sexuality and his pursuit of a... -
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige
Directed by Rea Tajiri | 32 mins | 1991
A groundbreaking, highly influential work by the Chicago-born visual artist and filmmaker Rea Tajiri, this poetic tapestry of the personal and the political reckons with the internment of some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, amo... -
Signal 8
Directed by Simon Liu | 14 mins | 2019
A hypnotic portrait of contemporary Hong Kong, Chinese-English filmmaker Simon Liu’s 16mm short is a city symphony that captures the urban infrastructure of his hometown in all of its enigmatic discord, as quotidian images of daily life are haunted by strang... -
afternoon
Directed by Erica Sheu | 3 mins | 2017
Taking inspiration from Jonas Mekas’s "The Diary Film," Los Angeles-based Taiwanese experimental filmmaker Erica Sheu deploys hand-processed 16mm film and in-camera editing to evoke the perspective of gazing through a window and onto the domestic life of an ...
