Film Screening | Lights from the Underground (Experimental Shorts)

This screening will be accompanied by a live Q&A session with the filmmakers Thant Si Thu Bo, Moe Myat May Zarchi, Wai Mar Nyunt, Gu Gu and Lin Htet Aung calling in online.

Date: 4 Feb, Saturday
Time: 4pm - 5.45pm
Venue: Oldham Theatre
Free admission via registration
REGISTER HERE

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Lights from the Underground - WORLD PREMIERE

programmed and written by Moe Myat May Zarchi (3-ACT)

“In the darkest times buried underground, spots of lights begin to emerge from the ground”.

The heightened risk of the political situation in Myanmar led many filmmakers to switch identities and to stay low-profile while they continued with more covert forms of self expression. Although Myanmar is still in an early stage of its experimental film practice, the prospect of creating bolder and more abstract films in the spirit of DIY is a hopeful one as seen through the 5 films in this series, which reflect the conflicting emotions of our current times.

The short films from Lights from the Underground are the result of the experimental filmmaking workshop held by 3-ACT in collaboration with Image Forum Tokyo in 2022. These works reveal that when logic or language are limited in their ability to communicate, sometimes emotions, trauma or thoughts can only be articulated in abstract and embodied ways. They bear witness to the spirit of exploration and experimentation with the film medium and transcend the barriers of what seems possible. These lights from the underground illuminate matters regarding frequent electricity outages, bringing to mind childhood memory and guilt, homesickness and helplessness, lucid dreams and the cathartic release of trauma buried in the undergrounds of each of us.

Hello World! (2022)

Description
Director: Thant Si Thu Bo
Runtime: 13 minutes
Country: Myanmar
Language: Burmese
Rating: Pending

Synopsis
A film editor’s feelings of entrapment in everyday life, documented through snippets of his social media and the laborious process of editing, are  punctuated by impressionistic shots of water, acting as reminders of the possibility of freedom and fluidity.

Director’s Bio
Thant Si Thu Bo is a cinematographer and editor. He joined the Film and Society workshop organised by Wathann and FAMU in 2018 which helped develop his passion for art films. He won the Best Cinematography Award at the Wathann Film Festival 2020 and wants to continue exploring the combinations that sound and the moving image offer.

The Altar (ဘုရားစင်) (2022)

Description
Director: Moe Myat May Zarchi
Runtime: 10 minutes
Country: Myanmar
Language: Burmese
Rating: Pending

Synopsis
Photographic sequences painted with golds and greys animate the guilt of a childhood incident involving the killing of an ant while washing hands in the sink. The Zen-like visuals are enmeshed with whispered monologues and glitching noises, meditating on the realms of the cosmos, power, guilt, prayers, and existence itself.

Director’s Bio
Moe Myat May Zarchi (born in 1994, Myanmar) is a filmmaker, musician and a multidisciplinary artist. Her short films have been screened at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Women Make Waves International Film Festival, Minikino Film Festival and have won awards at Singapore International Short Film Festival (SGIFF), Bangkok ASEAN Film Festival (BAFF) and UK Asian Film Festival. She was a finalist in the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in Moving Image and was awarded the Prince Claus Seed Award for Emerging Artists. In most of her works, Moe loves to explore aspects of identity involving the metaphysical, personal and feminine through the innovative use of visuals and sound. She founded a cinema magazine and organisation called “3-ACT” to support cinema education in Myanmar.

The Mute (ဆွံ့) (2022)

Description
Director: Wai Mar Nyunt
Runtime: 28 minutes
Country: Myanmar, Finland
Language: Burmese
Rating: Pending

Synopsis
Straddling between two places, a woman struggles to speak out for her country that she currently lives far away from. Fraught with a sense of dislocation, she alternates between capturing everyday life in her familial home with a travelogue cum performance art in her new country of residence. Together, they compose a distanced observation of her subjectivity while being silenced.

Director’s Bio
Wai Mar graduated with a Degree in Fine Art in 1998, and has made several group art exhibitions showing her video art and installations in the early 2000s. After studying filmmaking in 2007, she enjoys making essay and poetic films.

Light Matter (လွန်ဆွဲနေ့ရက်များ ) (2022)

Description
Director: Gu Gu
Runtime: 15 minutes
Country: Myanmar
Language: Burmese
Rating: Pending

Synopsis
If darkness is suppression, then light is freedom. In the context of electricity shortages and frequent blackouts that come and go with the country’s shifting political landscape, signs of resilience, both sonic or visual, illuminate the darkness with an increased rhythm and brightness.

Director’s Bio
After completion of his education at Yangon Film School, Mann Pye Phyo Aung aka Gu Gu participated in the ‘Shi exhibition’ with his short documentary Everyday Needs. Winner of the Goethe-Institut Myanmar award for his next documentary Lashio Ambulance, most of his time is spent filming and photographing different stories.

Eclipse (နေကြတ်ခြင်း)

Description
Director: Lin Htet Aung
Runtime: 35 minutes
Country: Myanmar
Language: Burmese
Rating: Pending

Synopsis
A new soldier arrives for duty at an army camp where soldiers have fled. Combining fragments of an allegorical poem and historical illustrations with meditative shots of nature and a hypnotic soundscape, the film revolves around a cryptic lucid dream he has on the day of arrival at the campsite, alluding to historical trauma and the cyclical nature of time.

Director’s Bio
Born in 1998, Lin Htet Aung is a self-taught filmmaker and time-based media artist based in Myanmar. In 2020, his experimental short film Estate won the Silver Screen Award for Best Director at the 31st Singapore International Film Festival. His latest short films Seeking Wombs For Rebirths (2021) and Me and My Country Pornography (2022) have been selected at 68th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2022). He is interested in the concept of time, duration, history, archiving and projection. He is always seeking the magic of changing details in his environment through time and composes them as dysfunctional stories in his artworks.

This film is featured in Altered States: New Moving Image Works of Myanmar, part of the exhibition programme for Altered States: Painting Myanmar in a Time of Transition.

About Altered States: New Moving Image Works of Myanmar

As part of SMU’s exhibition, “Altered States: Painting Myanmar in a Time of Transition”, the Asian Film Archive presents a contemporary Myanmar moving image programme, which includes 2 feature-length documentaries, A Thousand Fires (2021), Rain in 2020 (2021), and the world premiere of 5 experimental shorts from Lights From the Underground. Together, these films compose an intimate portrait of contemporary Myanmar in flux — focusing on the heterogeneity of its communities, including new immigrants, ethnic minorities and young activists, each with different visions of the future.

Examining the deeply intertwined relationship between the land and the communities who inhabit it, the two feature documentaries are lushly photographed geographic immersions into the tale of two families and their connections with jade and oil mining, respectively. Far from a static portrayal of their lived realities, the films reveal a web of connections between labour, politics, and spirituality, surfacing a dynamic rhythm between cycles of nature and capital through a plurality of voices and elemental forces. Meanwhile, the Lights from The Underground films which resulted from the experimental filmmaking workshop held by 3-ACT in collaboration with Image Forum Tokyo in 2022, is an exploration of new image-making practices revolving around light, its absence and presence, entanglements with physical temporality and meditations on trauma.