Date: Sat 25 Jan

The Projector, Cineleisure

The signature Fringe Film Programme of S.E.A. Focus, OFF Focus, returns in 2025 at Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure to present a series of distinct artist videos and films from the region.

Everything in its Time brings together three filmic works from acclaimed Southeast Asian filmmaker-artists Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), Royston Tan (Singapore), and Boedi Widjaja (Indonesia). Presenting Monologue (2015), Half (2022), and Path. 13, Quaver Cipher (2023) respectively, this film programme offers a diverse exploration of Southeast Asian narratives, delving into personal and collective histories, societal challenges, and the complexities of identity and memory. Collectively, the works offer an intimation of pasts, presents, and futures, entailing their own observations, insights, and prophecies on the state of the human condition and its evolution.

The screening will be followed by a live Artist Q&A moderated by John Tung. Each ticket comes with a complimentary drink to be redeemed at No Spoilers Bar.

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Monologue

Monologue is a moving address of Cambodia's violent past and in many ways, a study of the nature of trauma - how it collapses time and space and makes distancing from, and thus forgetting history, an impossible task. Both personal and public in nature, the film documents a small plot of land near the rural Banteay Meanchey province (formerly Battambang), where Rattana's sister and grandmother were discarded and buried alongside five thousand others during the Khmer Rouge regime in 1978. An idyllic portrait of the landscape at first glance, the work is a sobering reminder of both the literal and psychological void left behind after the conflict. Rattana's monologue to the sister he never met, who passed away three years before he was born, reveals his struggle to come to terms with the senseless violence and loss experienced by his family and the country. The emptiness in the landscape suggests a deep trauma that can never be represented wholly and thus, never fully comprehended. Against these tranquil scenes, the atrocities he speaks of seem all the more inhuman and unfathomable, becoming increasingly disquieting to comprehend as the video unfolds.

Half

What happens if your reflection breaks free from you? What will it do and where will it go?

Half is an explosive and intimate dance portrait of a dancer and his reflection. The film offers a fusion of film and dance by incorporating movements within the image. Through this, it also explores the idea of having multi-faceted layers within the self. Half is directed by critically acclaimed local director Royston Tan and produced by Chuan Pictures, in collaboration with co-choreographer and dancer Zhuo Zihao, co-choreographer Yarra Ileto as well as composer and sound designer Chong Li Chuan.

Half is a dance film commissioned by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay. It is presented as part of Dance en Scene by Esplanade, in partnership with National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) (Taiwan), National Taichung Theater (Taiwan) and Tai Kwun - Centre for Heritage and Arts (Hong Kong).

Path. 13, Quaver Cipher

Path. 13, Quaver Cipher is a film that follows an explorer’s search for his pluralistic cultural beginnings. Led by his conversation with muons - cosmic ray particles that travel across galaxies to reach Earth, he journeys into mythic realms and higher-dimensional spaces.

Performing for the camera, Boedi Widjaja interacts with atmospheric muons with his custom-built sensor—a working instrument made of double geiger-counters and an open-source algorithm—in a multidisciplinary work that enfolds performance, algorithmically processed poetry, CGI, and experimental photography. To make the film, Boedi developed a photographic method to manifest the presence of invisible muons; and the images were described by renowned muography scientist Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka, University of Tokyo, as the world’s first fine art muography that he has seen.

The work continues Boedi’s decade-long research into body, memory, language and encoding, informed by the intercultural liminality of his migrant experience.