WINDOWS PROGRAM 2: There is no better Place
Windows Program 2: There is No Better Place (90 min)
Featuring Anon Chaisansook’s There is no better Place, Riar Rizaldi’s Becquerel, Zachary Epcar’s The Canyon, Haig Aivazian’s All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes, and Jon Rafman’s Punctured Sky.
SHOWTIME: 14:30 / 7 Dec / SF World Cinema, Centralworld 3
There is No Better Place
Anon Chaisansook
Thailand, 2022, 15 min, No Dialogue, DCP
A man woke up and found himself in a strange abandoned room, not knowing that it was a stopover of his transfer to another mysterious place. He had no idea how he ended up here. Not even sure whether he was dead or alive. All his memories had disappeared. In the dead-end room, he wandered around, examining the emptiness.
Becquerel
Riar Rizaldi
Indonesia, 2021, 21 min, Bahasa with English Subtitles, DCP
In an alternative future of Indonesia, when nuclear technology reaches the point of generating an artificial sun for endless energy resources, a lazy philosopher Sajad Ali wandering around seeks a place to sleep. Told in a semi-essayistic approach, Sajad Ali reflects the dynamics of nuclear technology in the future, the politics of materiality through the search for minerals such as thorium in Indonesia, as well as the complexity of nuclear issue in the Global South and its tension with ecology, energy consumption, nation-state, and productivity.
The Canyon
Zachary Epcar
USA, 2021, 15 min, English, DCP
A portrait of the urban residential development as it slips into oblivion.
All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes
Haig Aivazian
Lebanon, 2021, 18 min, Arabic, English and French with English Subtitles, DCP
All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. From New York to Paris to Beirut, from the origins of whale oil lanterns to the era of predictive policing, the film assemblage accounts for the use of light and visibility in the service of social management, and creates space for a counter-optics of opacity and resistance.
Punctured Sky
Jon Rafman
USA, 2021, 21 min, English, DCP
A piece of a gamer’s past vanishes without a trace, triggering a quest for answers. Along the way, he encounters uncanny obstacles and part-human avatars – meticulously crafted from found pixels and cyber history – which call his own recollections of youth into question. Early internet aesthetics collide with the dark edges of online folklore, creating an unsettling yet deeply funny commentary on how technology pervades and mediates our humanity, memory, and concept of self.
