The liquid over my head

An Interrupted Investigation of R is an epistemological sci-fi detective film project. In this loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's The Investigation, R, a young amateur detective, investigates a puzzling and eerie case of missing—and apparently resurrected—bodies. To unravel the mystery, R consults scientific, philosophical, and theological experts, who provide him with a range of theories and clues.

Film created from the Polish Educational Archive materials, telling the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandist tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a locus of auto-fictional memories, with their scientific register shifted towards a treatment of images themselves as specimens.

The ghost of a possessed girl, trapped for centuries within a stone, encounters the director’s 102-year-old grandmother. What begins as a haunting becomes a tender dialogue, as archival, staged and documentary footage blur.

An incomplete word that we never hear is reduced to a single phoneme by echoes and stutters in digital cut-ups. The voice is not subordinated to any rational order, avoiding an adaptation to semantic content or syntactic structures. The digital sounds metaphorically blur distinctions between what is heard as natural or artificial and reference the dynamism and ephemerality of environments and forms of life. An amorphous figure appears timidly in a familiar background. We cannot predict its movements or what is going to become. We cannot decode its gender, age, nationality, or mood. It doesn’t follow any law, it’s just there to exist.

This film was part of Kyulim Kim’s time-based installation 600 Minutes (2025), based on the restoration of Rembrandt's The Night Watch. The painting darkened over time due to pigment discoloration. Similarly, 1950s–70s film footage often fades to magenta as yellow and cyan dyes deteriorate. This color loss reflects both the material fragility of film and the fading of social infrastructures once captured in it.