FILM REVIEW of UUFO
By Chen Liu

Based on shared family stories, the artist Yun Chen describes her experience of and response to events that occurred in the lives of her parents and grandparents during the cultural revolution. Yun’s short film, UUFO, reflects her connection to these events, as she attempts to arrive at a deeper level of understanding.

The artist’s presentation in her video is very creative and innocent. The Cultural Revolution is one of the most well-known events in China’s modern history, and is always presented in a very serious way. This culturally popular viewpoint is discussed at length and always generates a great deal of commentary. In contrast, Yun uses lots of experimental techniques inspiring viewers to regard the Revolution in a way that focuses on a sense wonderment.

Yun interprets the Cultural Revolution the same way any other historical event in China would be. But in her short film the artist ignores popular attitudes regarding the event and instead focuses on the feelings of experiencing it. Lastly, Yun associates the Revolution with a UFO, but in the case of her film she uses the title UUFO, unidentified “unidentified flying object”, seeing the revolution as an unexpected happening with an unexpected ending. She brings a very open perspective of the Cultural Revolution and would love for viewers to abandon the more commonly accepted attitude toward the event. In the beginning of the film, the artist uses a song “Ode to Coral”, sang by Peng Liyuan, the current first lady of China and at the end of the film, she clarifies UUFO. The careful and odd placement of these two things emphasize unexpected viewpoints within this short film – encouraging audiences to look at the Cultural Revolution as a historical event which may already submerge in history.

Traveling the Space Ways

Dear God I wish I still lived in NYC! This sounds amazing! So glad there is such energy and diversity put into the curation of these shows! Thank you Lili – it sounds like you are doing an amazing service for women in film!

Lara Dale

This is a great festival. I’m so glad it exists!

– Noe Kidder

The May 14th screening had a beautiful arch. The theme of body within the frame was clear and prevalent. Yet the diversity of the work and the different ways in which the artists were approaching the body created nuance and an interesting tension within the screening. The body was handled in such a way that it was redefined within each video—the body as poetry, as machine, as abstraction, as sound…

– Georgia Wall

I really appreciated how the screening on May 14 flowed well together aurally. Each work shown displayed a subtlety in its audio, an emphasis on quieter sounds such as breath, the tide, more subtle forms of beat, and ambient soundtracks. This aural tendency leant a real sense of continuity to the evening’s program.

– Ursula

Thank you Lili White for exposing me to Toxic Park, the great work of Cinzia Sarto & Emita Frigato. Toxic Park incarnates a visual storytelling landscape that defines how we are now meant to face technology and an experimental narrative genre. I have had a difficult time, as a film artist, surrendering my purist romance to celluloid and accepting the inevitable extinction of film. Toxic Park gave me hope. I was taken by the extremity of visual abstractions and the appropriation of the main character’s interpretation of this amusement park with sound and pictures.

I was constantly debating if the park was truly alive, or if this young girl desperately made the park only her’s to keep. This film (not video, which is a dirty word to me) sympathizes with the experience of true wonder in the world of amusement parks and the memories that we hold onto after such an experience touches us. Toxic Park reminded me of the important work of Olivier Assayas (Demonlover) and Lilliana Caviani (The Night Porter) and how what we see is usually what we get.

What I see in Toxic Park is a trance state and a cinematic drug that is mandating a healthy intoxication to all of those desperately trying to survive in this rapidly moving world of gadgets and renovation. I did not need a battery or electrical plug to think about what I felt about this film, so I know for a fact that the human part of how we see and absorb contemporary cinema has real hope. And, so do amusement parks. Thank Gawd Almighty.

– Joey Huertas (aka Jane Public)

Anuradha Chandra’s Blink of an Eye was a complicated film, impressionistic, idiosyncratic, not sure my memory is doing it justice. I was completely fascinated with it, especially the way the filmmaker would investigate a shape, move on, and then return to that shape, perhaps informed somewhat by the intervening set of images. Really wonderful sensibility here in the navigation between forms.The rhythmic feel to the cuts helped time expand and then by contrast speed up. While watching, I remember being very interested in light moving to shadow. At some moments, the film felt to me completely about time. Other movements felt more about shape, or light. Soundtrack was perfect. Thanks for showing it. I would definitely go out of my way to see more work by this filmmaker now.

– AF