Peng Zu-Qiang

In the first scene, two men stand outside of a car, waiting for the air conditioner to cool down the vehicle. As one puts on some house music using the car’s CD player, their silence is broken into a state of indescribable feelings. In the second scene, shot on Super 8 film, a person tries to recount a story as he spins a pen around in his hands. As he narrates the story which he cannot fully remember, he ponders this unusual amnesia. In the third scene, also filmed on Super 8, focuses on two pairs of hands cutting each other’s nails, the caring yet sensitive gesture were echoed by the intertitles. Improvised with a non-white cast, featuring queer and asian bodies, these fragmented memories, uneasy gossip, and moments of silence, center on one key question: When the idea of an individual subject cannot take form, how might we reconsider being visible, audible, or legible?

A portrait that follows Nan, my uncle and the last two years he and his parents live together. In long, tightly framed shots, a picture emerges of three intimately interwoven lives: the gentle and touching bickering between Nan and his mother, the evenings in front of the television when time seems to stand still, and the minutes ticking by as Grandpa silently peels an apple. In the film, disability is not only seen as symptoms on individual bodies, but as social, physical, and temporal relationships. It is a meditation on time, disabilities, and the economies of care in contemporary China.

A portrait that follows Nan, my uncle and the last two years he and his parents live together. In long, tightly framed shots, a picture emerges of three intimately interwoven lives: the gentle and touching bickering between Nan and his mother, the evenings in front of the television when time seems to stand still, and the minutes ticking by as Grandpa silently peels an apple. In the film, disability is not only seen as symptoms on individual bodies, but as social, physical, and temporal relationships. It is a meditation on time, disabilities, and the economies of care in contemporary China.

A portrait that follows Nan, my uncle and the last two years he and his parents live together. In long, tightly framed shots, a picture emerges of three intimately interwoven lives: the gentle and touching bickering between Nan and his mother, the evenings in front of the television when time seems to stand still, and the minutes ticking by as Grandpa silently peels an apple. In the film, disability is not only seen as symptoms on individual bodies, but as social, physical, and temporal relationships. It is a meditation on time, disabilities, and the economies of care in contemporary China.

A portrait that follows Nan, my uncle and the last two years he and his parents live together. In long, tightly framed shots, a picture emerges of three intimately interwoven lives: the gentle and touching bickering between Nan and his mother, the evenings in front of the television when time seems to stand still, and the minutes ticking by as Grandpa silently peels an apple. In the film, disability is not only seen as symptoms on individual bodies, but as social, physical, and temporal relationships. It is a meditation on time, disabilities, and the economies of care in contemporary China.

Inauguration looks at the fragmented history of the Young China Association. Interweaving temporal connections with faint chances of synchronous events between two disparate events at the margins of Chinese revolutionary history: a failed assassination and an impossible trip. The film narrates a forecast of the past, wherein it renders visible the processes of erasure, remembrance, and archival anchors of the early overseas Chinese revolutionary politics and its aftermaths. Movements, geographies, and events do not follow a linear arch but rather are scattered across memories and places, only to be treated as residues, witnesses or simply discards of the history. What happens when the premise of the story is, in fact, the assurance of its erasure?

Accordion Class explores the under-examined history of the accordion and its legacy in China, as the only permitted western instrument during the cultural revolution. Since then, the accordion’s popularity and influence has risen and fallen over half a century. Looking at accordion classes and competition today, the film presents how the instrument is taught, performed and received by a younger generation in the city of Changsha.