New Cinema Shorts \\ Angela YT Chan: Turbidity
Turbidity curated by Angela YT Chan [26 mins]
Turbidity – the amount of solid particles that are suspended in water and that cause light rays shining through the water to scatter. Thus, turbidity makes the water cloudy or even opaque in extreme cases – Dictionary of Water Terms
The circuit of water movement, from its long journeys across the planet to its ethereal healing within our bodies, brings us directly into the water cycle itself. As it carries itself between our geographies, social and intimate unfoldings, what becomes sedimented, soluble or constantly in flux in our environments?
Turbidity is a collection of short films that capture the fractals of light, which flicker through the murkiness of movement and change. The works explore displacement, gender fluidity and multi-species conflicts, to accept belonging in its perpetually traversing and unclear state.
Image: The Island is No Home, Shamica Ruddock, 2020
The Island is No Home / Shamica Ruddock / 2020
The Island is No Home is a short reflection on displacement, diaspora and communal relations to land influenced by the writings of Homi K. Bhabha, Grada Kilomba and Claudia Rankine amongst others. Thinking often about the way familiarity with a landscape contributes in the act of home-making, and the horizon as implying always something further and beyond, this work momentarily contemplates from a place of being without belonging. The Island is No Home uses text, sound and digitally manipulated 35mm.
RIPPLES / Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer / 2018
RIPPLES is a queer, short fashion film collaboration between filmmaker Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer and fashion designer Jawara Alleyne, both from London. It is an experimental film tracing and questioning the boundaries of masculinity and gender presentation. It is about fluidity, the film as a skin or fabric, as an embodiment of the body’s movements. It is a meditation on time, an extension of time and pause for appreciation of the senses. Jawara presents his fluid clothing collection, referencing his Caymanian heritage, tracked by Anuka’s liquid camera instalments.
Voice from Elsewhere / Lo Lai Lai Natalie 勞麗麗 / 2018
<焉知> Voices from Elsewhere is a short film by artist and farmer Lo Lai Lai Natalie about the differing agendas of the fishpond farmers, birdwatching conservationists, and birds in the fishponds of Hong Kong’s New Territories, as they face the influences of a conservation scheme. Narrated by a fictional local village radio presenter, who hosts an informative programme to explore the countering demands of the multispecies stakeholders, among providing weather updates and off-air anecdotal reflections with curiosity, humour and concern. Lo’s in-water, aerial and long-distance binocular imagery of this environment further set out the latest changes in the longer history of the former rice paddies turned fishponds, and how its ecology’s many agents cohabit in proximity to one another.
For New Cinema Shorts, AND Festival 2021’s weekly programme of short form cinema, we invited guest curators to each select week-long waves of moving images that ripple and reflect across the festival’s virtual, real and post-digital landscapes.