Flesh, Ecstasy
Curated by SHEN Shuowen
Ecstasy has long named moments when the conscious self exceeds itself, through erotic desire, religion, mystical vision, or philosophical displacement. “Flesh, Ecstasy” asks what happens when it is flesh, rather than the conscious self alone, that enters these states of transport, through sex, dreams, remembrance, rebellion, death, migration, metamorphosis, and the everyday.
Returning to the Greek ekstasis, “to stand outside oneself,” it understands ecstasy as a temporary suspension of the categories through which we make sense of the world. The programme turns toward the boundaries that such moments unsettle: between human and animal, body and landscape, memory and dream, self and other. Flesh is not what remains within these boundaries, but what emerges through their undoing.
Across fiction, animation, and expanded moving image, these works approach the body through distinct modes of storytelling and perception. At a moment when political life is increasingly organized through hardened borders and fixed identities, what might ecstasy offer, not as escape, but as another way of sensing, relating, and becoming together?
Selected Works
1. Modern Masturbation Allegory — LI Xinyi
2. Before the Sea Forgets — Ngoc Duy Le
3. The House of the Father — Johee Oh
4. Apus Apus (Aka Five Meals and a Swift) — Alfie Elms
5. John Wishes — YANG Yi
6. Where Rivers Part 水门的洞口 — DENG Linlin
7. Maybe in the Snow — Laurence Ly
The Borrowed Compasses
Curated by Jane Zhenyi WEI
Before we learn to recalibrate a compass of our own, a default one has already been placed in our hands — set to a normative north. Family, language, education, inherited cultures and the places called home furnish the coordinates through which a self becomes legible. Yet orientation is never entirely personal. Borders, institutions and regimes later relocate the axis, assigning degrees of belonging, distance and otherness.
“The Borrowed Compasses” traces six conditions of disorientation. Moving from interpersonal othering to institutional exclusion, from diasporic practices of return, to perching as a provisional form of belonging, and finally to estrangement on native ground. These films approach disorientation more than simply as a loss of direction, but as a contested relation between body, land and inherited systems of reference. The compass becomes less an instrument of arrival than a figure for orientation itself: received, overturned and continually revised.
Selected Works
1. Thick & Sweet 甜腻腻 — WANG Yinan
2. Land Sailing 边境航行 — WANG Ziyi
3. Take care, till springtime — SHI Yi
4. As a bird that briefly perches 擇鳥記 — Dorothy Cheung
5. Cyclone 氣旋 — MT
6. To Turn — Chang Ming Lee
Things Brought Ashore 舶来品
Curated by Jane Zhenyi WEI
Once used to describe commodities arriving by ship, the Chinese term 舶来品 (bóláipǐn) evokes objects carried from elsewhere and unloaded onto unfamiliar shores. Yet foreignness does not end there.
Labour remains embedded in objects; rituals acquire a local taste; data folds them into memory; performance recasts their borrowed forms; exotic infrastructure settles into land; history lodges in the body. As reception gives way to reconfiguration, the gaze starts to turn outward, then back upon its own history.
Across six films, “Things Brought Ashore” traces this circulation from internalisation to reinterpretation and return — asking not where imports originate, but who reframes them, who observes, and what histories come back into view.
Selected Works
1. Beauty · Labors 美·工 — SUN Tiange
2. Birthday cakes from China 生日蛋糕 恭祝你福寿与天齐 — ZHANG Shengjia
3. PARK.DAT 公园.DAT — DU Zhenyu
4. Hong Kong Heels 港出我天后 — Elias Fritz & Carlos Laux y Silió
5. Where clouds once formed 雲過無雨 — Yu Hsin Su
6. King of Cyborg Elephant — Nanut Thanapornrapee
Re:Framing the Topography
Curated by Julia Falero
When we tell stories, we often overlook the surroundings. A hill, a lake, a house, a school — the buildings and landscapes around us are also silent participants in our lives. They shape the conditions in which our stories unfold, and remain an important part of our memories, through smell, touch, and sound.
In this programme, the filmmakers engage with the topography through their lenses and show how it affects the main characters. They do so in different ways — by exploring the living conditions in a specific terrain, offering a glimpse of life in a place that has become forgotten, or telling the story of those who are absent and those who remain through the house that was inhabited.
They take us far away from the bustle of the metropolis, to decaying cities, islands and the countryside. The everyday surroundings that become blurred by daily routines provide here the context for their stories — stories where religion, customs, family ties and landscapes become one. Thus, these stories are not only about the people, but about the places that shaped them.
Selected Works
1. Stars Beneath the Waves — YAN Wendi
2. My Lens, My Land — CHEN Ke
3. A Winter in the Winter 越冬 — LIU Haotian
4. This House of Ours — Jay NGO
Re:Framing the History of the Absence
Curated by Stella Kluge
“No, how could you remember? You weren't even there. But now that I think about it, neither was I.” — Amnesiac, Greg Santos
In attempting to establish a new framework for narratives within the audiovisual heritage of East and Southeast Asia and its diasporas, especially in times of political and societal instability, tension, and rapid change, it becomes clear how many tellings of the past have never even reached the edges of this framework.
What remains are gaps: lost memories, banished remembrances, absences that quietly rewrite the history we thought we already knew. Not only in the history of a nation, a society, or a culture, but also in the historiography of personal identity itself, questions begin to surface: How can we keep a culture of remembrance alive? What happens when those whose oral testimony shaped an entire family's memory are no longer with us? How much of the origins of our own identity has already been buried?
The politics of absence feels more urgent than ever within today's discourses on a New Film History. This programme of six short films works with precisely these absences. They speak to us of memories, trauma, rituals, and identity: buried stories that now serve as navigation points for the present.
Rather than resolving into a sharper focus on a unified “Asian narrative,” the films invite us to step into the differences within and between East and Southeast Asian contexts and their diasporic experiences, dwelling in tensions, disjunctures, and loose threads that have yet to be articulated.
Selected Works
1. Where Does the Rain Come From? — Ruiqi Luo
2. Certain Lives Become Buoys — Jiyoung Yim & Lou Kim
3. The Land Where Ghosts Could Speak — Tianhui Wu
4. The Oriental Pearls — Dino Zhang
5. Archives of Guanyang — Jiang Zeping
6. Until We Meet Again / 不说再见 — Jiayi Liang
Six Encounters — Jury's Pick
Curated by Echo Xuedan TANG
This programme brings together six films selected through Re:Frame's founding jury: a collective process shaped by distinct disciplines, regions, and ways of seeing.
The works do not share a subject or aesthetic. What they hold in common is a preoccupation with encounter — between a body and its limits, between languages that fail to translate, between people that systems have made invisible, between the human and the machinic, between two people sharing a space and slowly confronting what they have kept hidden. In each film, something unexpected passes between one thing and another: briefly, incompletely, and without resolution.
Rather than a consensus, this is a constellation of six different ways of seeing, placed in proximity.
Selected Works
1. Flamingo In The Garden — MA Xinhui
2. Interlanguage — Sangeun Lee
3. Lingua Automata — Long Pham
4. Tico Tico Life 品质生活 — ZHANG Suhao
5. Distances 何处可去 — YANG Liping
6. The Haunting Damp 雨的另一种形状 — ZHOU Xing Zhi
To Mean It
Curated by DENG Qiwen
A wish calculated to be as precise as possible, and a ritual performed on demand, can look identical from outside. Sincerity, if it exists, may never be a quality that can be verified from within. It can be a decision, made even where nothing is promised in return.
“To Mean It” brings together four works, each reaching toward something: a falling asteroid, an alien presence, a nation that demands to be sworn to, and a strip of land on a border that flickers between fact and mirage. None of these gestures comes with assurance: the object may never have been listening, may never answer even if it was. What the works hold in common is that they reach anyway, and the seriousness of the attempt.
They were selected for the distance between them: the scales run from the cosmic — fated, then unconfirmed — to the institutional, to the contour of an islet, and the posture survives that distance. Facing a condition that cannot be reversed, what these works hold onto is the order kept in the act of completing the gesture, not the outcome — that order, their shared form of resistance.
Perhaps no one can answer, on behalf of these gestures, whether they were meant. But those who carried them through never asked for one. They simply kept reaching.
Selected Works
1. A Wonderful Thing to Do — CHEN Oulin
2. 2024: A Swiss Odyssey — Florian Rudolph, WU Yueqi, Kyrylo Alferiev
3. Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge) — Aisha Servia
4. Mianhua Islet — Hsin-Yu Chen