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  7. Mythology of Origins

Mythology of Origins

Mythology of Origins

Followed by a talk with Asarela Orchidia Dewi and Julia Diệp My Feige

Garden Amidst The Flame
Natasha Tontey, Indonesia/Switzerland 2022, 27 min. English with English subtitles, digital

Their Memory (Memori Dia)
Asarela Orchidia Dewi, Indonesia 2022, 19 min. Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles, digital

Mary, Mary, So Contrary
Nelson Yeo, Singapore 2019, 15 min. English with English subtitles, digital

Yến
Julia Diệp My Feige, Germany 2021, 16 min. Vietnamese with English subtitles, digital

Origins, though appearing to have determinative power, are extremely elusive. The films in this program ponder and contest origin stories as static artifacts and instead offer a multitude of origin rituals, mythologies and contestations of becoming. Garden Amidst the Flame fuses coming-of-age ceremonial rituals, everyday banter and ancestral generational knowledge formations among a group of Minahasan teenagers in North Sulawesi, where indigenous animistic cosmo-technologies, gift economies and mutual aid ensure that ‘alienation on a western scale can never happen’. In Their Memory, Azka (they/he) is enters a slowly unfolding childhood memoryscape; once revisited, memories that have played a pivotal role in shaping their identity emerge in a different light. Mary, Mary, So Contrary weaves together a phantasmagoric narrative about a Chinese woman named Ma Li who dreams that she is a Caucasian woman named Mary. Yến portrays the unfolding of a fresh love between two college students in Hanoi where societal demands and idealized and romanticized expectations towards women exist as a constant background noise.

Julia Diệp My Feige is a German-Vietnamese director, doctor and artist who studies Fine Art at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in the class of Koenraad Dedobbeleer. With her short film EVA (2020) she was nominated for the Deutscher Nachwuchsfilmpreis in 2021 and in 2023 she received a Deutschlandstipendium. Through her practice, she investigates the intrinsic nature of the static and the moving image.

Asarela Orchidia Dewi is an Indonesian filmmaker and visual artist currently living in Berlin. Their work often deals with LGBTQ+ topics, asian diasporic perspectives and intergenerational dialogues. Moving fluidly between film, visual installation, and performance art, Asarela experiments with different forms of visual expression. Since 2017, Asarela has been a member of Soydivision, a contemporary art collective based in Berlin. Their short film Memori Dia has been shown at Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival and Luststreifen Film Festival Basel.