George CLARK / cast: CHEN Shien-Jen / digital / 16min. / 2016 (UK / Taiwan)
Filmed in and around the island of Taiwan, the film is structured around an interview with contemporary artist CHEN Chieh-Jen. The film explores the relationship between film, landscape and rural life and the layered histories of these sites as potential places of self-organisation and resistance. Built around the question of translation and the relationship of what we hear to what we see, the film follows Chen’s retelling of the farmer’s tradition of using film screenings as means of covert political assembly during the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan.
The title is an English translation of the Chinese term 雲海 / yúnhai, used to describe the view from Taiwan’s highest mountains when everything below is hidden from view by a sea of clouds.
Filmed in and around the island of Taiwan, the film is structured around an interview with contemporary artist CHEN Chieh-Jen. The film explores the relationship between film, landscape and rural life and the layered histories of these sites as potential places of self-organisation and resistance. Built around the question of translation and the relationship of what we hear to what we see, the film follows Chen’s retelling of the farmer’s tradition of using film screenings as means of covert political assembly during the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan.
The title is an English translation of the Chinese term 雲海 / yúnhai, used to describe the view from Taiwan’s highest mountains when everything below is hidden from view by a sea of clouds.