Program 8

Short film program consisting of:

IF YOU DON’T WATCH THE WAY YOU MOVE
DESERT DREAMING
MANGOSTEEN

Total running time approx. 64 min.

If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move

IF YOU DON’T WATCH THE WAY YOU MOVE features Derek “Dripp” Whitfeld Jr. and Taymond “ChoSkii” Hughes of the music group BmE composing and recording their latest composition, “Shiesty,” in the Columbus, Mississippi, studio of Jermaine “Country Blakk” Brown, only to be interrupted by a John Cage score.

Desert Dreaming

DESERT DREAMING began with inquiring into all that is missing, yet forms one’s consciousness in the family portrait and transforming spaces of a familial home. This film is part of an ongoing project that traces labor migration to the Middle East and the micro impacts of large shifts such as the neoliberalization of the economy in the ‘70s, the civil war that began in the ‘80s, and subsequent postwar transformations in Sri Lanka. It challenges monolithic narratives of personal history and middle-class Muslim upbringing through anecdotal and intimate recollections. By means of collage techniques and pixelation, images blur and mutate in the ways that remembrance is equally the space of invention, repression, and reformulation. The process is made apparent through a video superimposed with intergenerational conversations, using an aural landscape drawn from the soundtrack to a famous Tamil film, ULAGAM SUTRUM VALIBAN (The youth who traveled the world, 1973). MGR, the star of the film, was born in the artist’s hometown in Sri Lanka in the same year as his grandfather. MGR’s onscreen swashbuckling characters were the fodder of dreams for a generation of young people including the artist’s aunts and uncles, even as they had to evade the strict supervision of their father to watch them.

Mangosteen

MANGOSTEEN tells the story of Earth, a young man who returns to his hometown, Rayong, where his sister, Ink, runs a fruit processing factory. During a casual meeting, Earth finds out that his definition of the term “future” is drastically different from his sister’s. The more he tries to involve himself in the fruit juice business, the less he feels needed there. Earth eventually decides to distance himself from the family operation and resumes his old hobby, writing a violent, psychic, irrational, abstract, gory, and unrealistic novel.
Switching narrative directions as well as languages, MANGOSTEEN weaves a meandering path through factory floors and orchards. The film was shot on outdated Digital8 video cameras and follows no clear narrative logic. It is a film as much about storytelling as it is about its protagonist’s erratic and surprising idiosyncrasies.