"Borders and Temporalities"
"Amid geopolitical challenges and pandemics, two artists reinterpret time through their family ties and their experiences with screens."
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Q&A with filmmaker OK Pedersen and Yinan Wang
Discussant: Manuel Carrion Lira, Ph.D. Candidate Literature Department UC San Diego
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11/16/2024 4:00 PM
Suraj Israni Cinematic Center - Mosaic Room 113
La Salle d'Attente
Directed by: OK Pedersen
In this fictional documentary, present-day Nation borders have collapsed into vast privatized housing complexes. Epitomizing advanced capitalism’s financialization and incarceration, the citizens of “Condo World” live in a so-called dream where it’s illegal and punishable to leave. The “real” outside is uninhabitable — likely due to ecological devastation — and curiously, unseeable. Both incarceration and holiday travel entail the same virtual escape into a world where nothing can be acted upon. On the occasion of such a virtual holiday, the narrator loses her sister — or, possibly, the sister loses herself.
Folding together loneliness and inaction, La salle d'attente implies a certain ineptitude of seeing, suggesting that even in dreams, it is easier to describe what we saw than what we did. A barrage of found TV clips, cell phone videos, and Super 8 footage conjugate temporalities, saying so much but perhaps still too little — as in, too little, too late.
Fictional Documentary | 12 min | 2024 | Digital, Super 8mm
Audio language: English
Subtitles language: English
OK Pedersen
Filmmaker
OK Pedersen is an American artist and filmmaker of Iraqi descent, now living in Montreal. As an image-maker, her work focuses the unending loop between seeing, remembering, and knowing, and the function of images within this cycle. Often using the essay or narrative form, her practice moves back and forth between analogue and digital processes to reveal coincidences that point to the cyclical nature of existence. Her first documentary film, Cloud Gate 2 (2022), about the architecture of memory and the multifarious technologies which claim to enhance and optimize our collective knowledge, premiered at RIDM in 2022 and is distributed by Vidéographe.
Decoupling 脱钩
Directed by: Yinan Wang
Decoupling was once a term primarily used in cosmology, but it has now taken on a geopolitical significance, referring to the deteriorating relationship between China and the U.S.
The film ‘Decoupling’ is a story that a "Chinese" father reflects on the changing relationship of China and US during his trip to Beijing to retrieve his 3-year-old "American" daughter who has been stranded because of the recent “decoupling” of the two countries.
Born in China and living in the American Midwest, filmmaker Yinan Wang attempts to unpack his own experience of how a transnational migrant family deals with the distress caused by identity, nationalism, and geopolitics.
Fiction | 64 min | 2023 | Digital
Audio language: Chinese, English
Subtitles language: English
Filmmaker
Yinan Wang
Yinan was born and raised in Beijing. After working on a number of ethnographic works in China he moved to the United States and spent a number of years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yinan is a filmmaker and photographer, working at the intersection of Chinese and American cultures. His works always deals with the uncertainty and liquidity caused by his identity. As a transplant, continuously adopting, absorbing, and adjusting between where he grew up and where he is living generate an energy. This flux energy constantly sparks interests for his filmmaking and the way he is observing his immediate surrounding.
His works have aired on PBS and played at various venues including United States (US), Austria, Slovenia, Spain, and China. He was awarded the Cream City Cinema Emerging Voices Award by HBO in 2018. He was a fellow at the 74th University Film and Video Association 2020, and 67th Flaherty Film Seminar for 2022.