17/08/2019
DAS KAPiTAL
This afternoon at KAPiTAL we screen a documentary from Kin Man Denison Cheong, preceded by a moderated talk with the director himself. Coffee and scones also provided ! 5pm start.
Description:
Confused, frustrated but encouraged, he put his whole “him” into this film. The director approached his life struggles as a dilemma between the filmed and the non-filmed, the translation and the impossibility of communication, the voice-over and the subtitles. Once as a fan of Kon Ichikawa and Yasunari Kawabata, and a lover of Michio Takeyama’s novel “Harp of Burma”, he tried to express that complexity in a series of multilayered fictive/true stories through visual, audial and, especially, textual manipulations while questioning the power structure of image quality. Mixing his banal daily life, his past, and the filmmaking process, the director raised several anthropological and life questions on nature, origin, language, non-existence, identity, visual media and dominant cultures. He strived to find answers in a circle of interpreting himself in a conflict between oppressed and powerful languages, retranslating what was translated and letting others reinterpret him from both within and without the film. Would everything become useless when one transcended boundaries inside the mind?
