Solidarity: Communal Voices, Collective Action

These five short documentaries each look at a particular community’s shared histories and realities, through collaborative and performative expressions and explorations.

We open with Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s Black Bus Stop, a powerful, chanting tribute to an iconic gathering place for black students at the University of Virginia in the 1980s and 90s. In Cloud Forest by Eliane Bots five girls guide us through their own imaginations and impressions of their parents’ experiences of the war in the former Yugoslavia. We move to Chongqing in China for David Verbeek’s Trapped in the City of a Thousand Mountains, looking at the subculture of Chinese rap as a radical artistic expression for young people living in a surveillance state. Voices of Kidnapping by Ryan McKenna is a collection of radio broadcast recordings of family members reaching out to loved ones kidnapped in the Amazon jungle, set against abstract visuals of Colombian landscapes. We conclude with Rise by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, in which people from African and Caribbean descent perform in Toronto’s subway stations to reflect on their identities, creating cultural dialogue through words and rhythm.

This programme is curated and co-presented by Glasgow Short Film Festival.

“We’re used to seeing a house for its roof, windows, and walls. But in the end, as we move out of here, it breaks my heart.” Filmmaker Kavich Neang’s father is one of the hundreds of residents who must leave the iconic White Building in Phnom Penh. This housing block bore witness to a tremendous series of events: the young nation’s Golden Age; a traumatic breakdown under a radical regime; decades of cultural revival centred within its walls; and, the rapid pace of capitalist development that would ultimately lead to its demise. Now the once radiant walls are grey and damaged. Neang, born here in 1987 and raised inside, once dreamed of shooting a fiction film here, but reality overtook his plan. It’s now the location for his first full-length documentary. When demolition comes, it’s all just a memory.

Co-presented by Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival

SCOTTISH PREMIERE

The Western circuit of vloggers and YouTubers is dwarfed by live-streaming in China, which in a short time has become an industry worth billions. More than 422 million Chinese regularly shared streamed films in 2017. The strange and extreme are especially popular: a boy who eats live worms or two wrestlers dipped in wet paint. Viewers comment in the form of ‘bullets’ and reward the ‘anchors’ with virtual gifts that can be cashed in the real world.

Artist Zhu Shengze spent ten months following anchors with more marginal followings, editing more than 800 hours of footage to fashion a collective portrait of a generation for whom the online and offline worlds are tightly interwoven.

Supported by the Confucius Institute

SCOTTISH PREMIERE