When: January 27, 2024, 7:30 pm
Where: Billy Wilder Theater
In-person: Q&A with filmmakers and UCLA Associate Professor Jasmine Nadua Trice.
Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
Showcasing a collection of recent experimental works by Southeast Asian women filmmakers, Unsettling Landscape focuses on short films and videos that critically engage with questions of land, landscape and the myriad forms of mediation that have been used to capture their image. Like painting and the diorama, the camera has been a tool of colonial authority, historical narrative, and scientific knowledge production, laying the groundwork for unfettered development projects and extractive capitalism. Capturing an image of land through mediation can be an act of complicity, binding it and rendering it legible as scenery, property and territory. Reflexively engaging with such practices of mediation, these works suggest that the moving image also allows space for refusal. Unearthing the deep time of tectonic shifts and Animist belief systems, unraveling statist development narratives and unlearning colonial ways of knowing, these films unsettle the complex relations between lens and land, offering new possibilities for spatial transformation on screen.
Series programmed by CSWAC member and Associate Professor Jasmine Nadua Trice, UCLA Cinema and Media Studies.
