While based on experience, memory can also be constructed from myriad indirect and unlived sensations and even workings of the subconscious mind. With its variety of audiovisual strategies, the moving image is an apt medium to compose an elastic portrait of memory—one as much derived from imagination as based in fact. The filmmakers in this programme retrace their personal histories using archival or found materials and offer ways to collapse the past and present. Ultimately, they redefine the experience of time as personal.

The programme begins with Raymond Red’s Pelikula (1985), whose experimentations with nostalgic images and sounds prompt a type of subconscious remembrance. Wang Yiquan’s Very Personal (2022) is an essay film about the artist’s experience growing up in China that incorporates ideas and research from the 1955 film Flowers of the Motherland. Huang Pang-chuan’s Retour (2017) is composed of still images and draws parallels between the filmmaker’s train journey home from France and a journey taken by his grandfather decades prior. Poet Mimi Ye creates visual stanzas of absence and presence in They Are There but I Am Not (2009), a work composed of shots that were taken in Taiwan and Chicago. In The Horrible Thirty: Me, My Father and Richard the Tiger (2018), filmmaker Rina B. Tsou reflects upon turning thirty years old by imagining her late father turning thirty in the 1950s. Finally, in Going Home (2024), artist Heesoo Kwon recounts the story of her mother’s experience as a married Korean woman as layered through voice recordings, home-video footage, and family photos that are animated by 3D modelling and artificial intelligence programmes.