Director
What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upturns archival travelogue footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows tropes and patterns. The same shots repeat across decades, from landscape to cityscape to street scenes. Sometimes the footage reveals more about the traveler himself, such as a sequence where the camera curiously tracks the hips and bare legs of women wearing cheongsam crossing a busy intersection. Sia’s essay film studies these travelogues to find indignant subjects glaring back at the camera, or figures on the edges of the frame who appear pixelated and phantasmic, showing the patina of the footage’s circulation. Meanwhile, intertitles intermittently punctuate this footage with an oral history of Hong Kong, as told by Sia’s mother who describes colonial police, excrement and hauntings in Kowloon of the postwar era.
Director
The timeline and vertical aspect ratio of social media set the formal parameters for Tiffany Sia’s essay film, which follows the image trail of a single event in Hong Kong from the 2019 protests. Reckoning with this event, a relentless voiceover reframes archival media salvaged in the midst of disappearance and erasure, drawing upon a traumatic media memory, summoning ghosts and occult forces alongside disinformation and rumor.
Director
How do we reckon with our attachments to place, and their knotted historical relations? A meditation on maritime trade routes, Sea – Shipping – Sun is a short film directed by Tiffany Sia (b. Hong Kong) and Yuri Pattison (b. Dublin) shot over the span of two years to render a simulated duration of a day, beginning at twilight and closing with sunset. The film is set against shipping forecasts from archival BBC radio broadcasts. The sea contains a submerged history. Currents trace trade routes, and also draw a means of escape. While the sea binds communities together, it also disappears and drowns them. An ambient archival broadcast roils over footage of the sea channel traffic, and the sun emerges and disappears, again and again. Inspired by audio and visual media, from lullabies to ASMR videos, created with the intention of inducing sleep or relaxation, Sea – Shipping – Sun gathers a vision of entanglement. We are left with history’s residue: A gentle, rocking waltz over the sea.
Cinematography
Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film by Tiffany Sia about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist’s practice of scaling oral history, of showing political crisis in Hong Kong as ephemeral stories on Instagram for the past year.
Editor
Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film by Tiffany Sia about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist’s practice of scaling oral history, of showing political crisis in Hong Kong as ephemeral stories on Instagram for the past year.
Director
Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film by Tiffany Sia about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist’s practice of scaling oral history, of showing political crisis in Hong Kong as ephemeral stories on Instagram for the past year.
Executive Producer
Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.
