Short film, 10 mins
Originally shown at FELIX GAUDLITZ April 9 - June 25, 2022, as part of the solo exhibition "Minor Landscapes."
What Rules the Invisible (2022) is a short film that upends 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 traveller 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. The viewer is left to imagine these scenes there are no images for. Originally shown at FELIX GAUDLITZ in Vienna, Austria. World premiere at Open City Documentary Film Festival, and screened at Toronto International Film Festival's Wavelengths and New York Film Festival's Currents.
Toronto International Film Festival, Wavelengths – Toronto, CA
Open City Documentary Film Festival – London, UK
Flaherty Film Seminar – Hamilton, NY
New York Film Festival, Currents – New York, NY
San Diego Asian Film Festival (upcoming) – San Diego, CA
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (upcoming) – Chicago, IL