Xiao Zhang

Six immigrant friends constellate in Los Angeles while reflecting on intuition, perception, and the mythologies of a city. Blending documentary footage, voiced recollections, and diaristic entries, the film gathers fragments of lived experience and speculation into a collective imaginary of Los Angeles.

In a foreign city, a young woman wanders through the night in search of someone from her dreams. Amidst urban structures and encounters with strangers, she may not be dreaming alone.

A calling inhabits the blank pages, unfolding a secret writing of hers. The unseen written traces seep from the murmuring land, pushing through fragmented voices to become new forms, beings made material. Framed as a dialogue with my grandmother, this film explores an alternative form of personal writing by Chinese women in political shifts, absent and abundant. The 'blank' becomes an image, carrying a search for agency; of land transformed and of women unheard. By breaking down linguistic structures, the film opens a space for imagining, reading, and performing, allowing for emergence.

A time remnant inhabits a personal space with a secret, private, unspoken word of one's being. Sliding planes of window and time, throwing drifts of the inner and the outer self, the film seeks in the interval of memory for a transitory reunion with my family.