Short Video Program: Comrades I love you

La Double Vie de Maneejan (The Double Life of Maneejan)
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, Thailand 2013, digital file, 29 min. Thai with English subtitles

Auf Zeit #01
Sungeun Kim in collaboration with Naser Fathi, Ismail Karayakupoglu, Annika Haas, Mouna Assali, Germany 2016, digital file, 9 min. Arabic with English subtitles

Street Angel
Michelle Sui, USA 2021, digital file, 23 min. Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles

Manting
Shuyao Chen, China USA 2023, digital file, 15 min. Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles

What is the role of voices sung, manipulated, and embodied in queer films? These short films present the audience with various methods of using “vocal drag” to subvert the categories typically assigned to voice: From Michelle Sui’s reclaiming of Oriental Chinese Opera in Los Angeles to face its multi-ethnicity to Sungeun Kim’s ensemble reenactments of refugees’ experiences in German border-forests, a fictional Siamese figure who travels through (post)colonial periods who is patronizingly told how voice-over in multi-ethnic nations is “properly” done to awakened nostalgia, desire and questioning in a karaoke bar.

Michelle Sui is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and filmmaker. Their work exists at the intersection of theater, dance, film, vocal music, oral history, audio and new technologies and draws upon cinematic histories, language in translation, the performance of femininity, and the dislocations of memory.