Elemental Frequencies

Tellurian Drama

Director: Riar Rizaldi
Indonesia, 2020, 26', DCP, color
Indonesian with Turkish, English subtitles 

In 1923, the Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of Radio Malabar, a new radio station that brought about a violent clearing of two mountain peaks and forced labour of the indigenous people of the mountains, to install a huge radio transmitter near Mount Malabar in West Java. In March 2020, Radio Malabar was reactivated as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tuning in to forgotten wavelengths, Riar Rizaldi’s Tellurian Drama imagines what could have happened in between, opening up questions on the vital role of the mountain in history, colonial ruins as an apparatus for geoengineering technology, and the invisible power of indigenous ancestry. Narrated based on a fictionalised forgotten text by prominent pseudo-anthropologist Drs. Munarwan, Tellurian Drama problematises the notions of decolonisation, geocentric technology, and the historicity of communication.

How to Improve the World?

Director: Nguyên Trinh Thi
Vietnam, 2021, 46', DCP, color
Vietnamese with Turkish, English subtitles 

Set in the Central Highlands of Vietnam where a large concentration of groups of indigenous people live, Nguyên Trinh Thi’s How to Improve the World is a film about listening. An exercise in deep listening to the fading sounds of an oral tradition, Nguyên’s latest work reflects on the differences in how memory is processed between the culture of the eye and that of the ear, while observing the loss of land, forests, and the way of life of the indigenous people in this part of the world. The work foregrounds indigenous sound, voice and music against the contemporary backdrop of a land transformed by Christianization, war and socialism. Resisting the westernised reliance on images for creating narratives, telling stories and experiencing the world, the film turns to music and sound as a way of perceiving through listening.

Mud Man

Director: Chikako Yamashiro
Japan, 2016, 26', DCP, color 
Japanese, Korean with Turkish, English subtitles 

Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the centre of geopolitical controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military. Dual levels of juxtaposition feature throughout the film: visually through the intersplicing landscapes of the two islands, and more imperceptibly, through the sonic and linguistic remixing of unclear Japanese (Uchinaaguchi) and fragmented mumbling in Korean. The filmtells the story of a community visited by bird droppings that resemble clumps of mud falling from the sky. The droppings awaken the slumbering people, who pick the clumps up to listen to voices emanating from within, and speaking of history, nature and other communities. A continuation of Yamashiro’s method of using flesh and earth to draw analogies with the body politic of Okinawa, the film offers an unflinching gaze into the half-buried traumas of colonised islands.