PROGRAM
《A》East Asian Experimental Competition1
3 works, 75 min.
【TOKYO】Theatre Image Forum：9/27(SAT)11:00am、10/2(THU)9:00pm
【KYOTO】Demachiza：11/7(FRI) 7:35pm
【NAGOYA】Nagoyakinema Neu：11/22(SAT)1:10pm
The First Photograph
Jess LAU Ching-wa / digital / 11min / 2024 《Terayama Shuji Prize》
“I thought I would enter another world by climbing over the fence.” In August of 1978, the director’s father made a second attempt to escape along with two friends. Headed from China to Hong Kong, a distance of 200 km, they made their way through grassy fields. On August 18th, far away in the UK, Siouxsie and the Banshees released the protest song “Hong Kong Garden.” That morning, a father … A film that weaves a personal history that has been lost amid a chaotic social history.
Jess LAU Ching-wa
Jess Lau Ching-wa (b.1991) is a Hong Kong-born artist working with video, animation, and installation. Her practice explores narrative fragments, body memory, and temporality through layered, manual processes. Her works often blur the lines between reality and fiction. Jess currently lives and works between Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Veils of Landscape
YAMANAKA Chihiro / digital / 5min / 2025
In February, the atmosphere hangs low and the foothills are covered in mist. Layered animation rich in color transforms rhythmically, the brightness sometimes changing, as the scenery of each season in the foothills is vibrantly manifested on screen. The latest work by a filmmaker who has focused on the theme of “pursuing animated expression through landscapes.”
YAMANAKA Chihiro
Graduated in 2025 from the Department of Animation, Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts. Other works include A girl held between the trees since birth (2017), Sleeping Moon (2018), Into a Landscape (2024).
Hostile Landscapes
ZHANG Hanwen / digital / 59min / 2025《Grand Prize》
In October of 2021, North Korean defector JU Hyeongeon escaped from prison in China’s Jilin Province. After 40 days on the run, JU was wounded by police gunfire and captured near the Fengman Dam. Following the traces of a man who escaped from North Korea across a region straddling the part of China formerly known as Manchuria, this landscape film grapples with an aspect of modern East Asian history that still cannot be easily addressed.
ZHANG Hanwen
Hanwen Zhang is an artist and filmmaker originally from Changchun, China. Drawing from artistic research and field studies, his work examines specific landscapes, infrastructures, and mundane activities through images and texts, weaving them within a network of local, personal, transnational, historical, and ideological contexts. His recent research revolves around marginalized individuals’ exile, troublesome colonial heritage, and secret society activities against the backdrop of East Asian modern/contemporary history.
