Jean-Paul Bourdier

The film takes the notion of harmony in China as a site of creative manifestation, and draws from footage shot in 1993 and 1994, in Eastern and Southern China, specifically from provinces Anhui, Hubei, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangxi—linked to the remote origins of Chinese civilisation.

A complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, Reassemblage reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.

Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A Tale of Love follows the quest of a woman in love with Love. Voyeurism runs through the history of narrative and is here one of the threads that structure the film. Playing with the fiction of love in love stories, the film invites a different experience of cinema with non-naturalistic acting and layered interaction of performed reality, memory and imagination.

The film evolves around questions of identity, popular memory and culture. While focusing on aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives and history of women resistance in Vietnam and in the U.S, it raises questions on the politics of interviewing and documenting.

This is an elegant meditation on time, travel, and ceremony in the form of a journey. In her first foray into digital video, Trinh T. Minh-ha deconstructs the role of ritual in mediating between the past and the present.

“It all begins with two”: departure/return, earth/water, history/tourism… Starting from the ancient myth of Vietnam’s foundation – a battle between two dragons – and from the balance between earth and water that defines the country geographically, Trinh Minh-ha composes a palimpsest of words and images filmed in 1995 in Hi-8 video, then in HD in 2012. Words, superimposed, come and go like a graphic ballet that adds a layer to the archaeology visible in the landscape, a mix of ancient traditions and authoritarian attempts to eradicate them.

Night Passage is a digital film on friendship and death. Made in homage to Miyazawa Kenji's classic novel, Milky Way Railroad, the story evolves around the spiritual journey of a young woman, in the company of her best friend and a little boy, into a world of rich in-between realities. Their venture into and out of the land of "awakened dreams" occurs during a long ride on a night train. The filmmaker elegantly depicts each encounter in two-dimensional space with a unique artistic gesture and ingeniously frames the passage as a series of rhythmic image sequensces as seen through the window of a train.