Explores our interdependencies in all their beauty and harshness, fragility, persistence and vulnerability, familial and other ties are formed, and at the same time, formative. Their possibility is punctuated but not defined by socio-political histories, the deep-rooted inequalities of global capitalism and the bureaucratic structures of the modern world. What if we think of family not as a given unit of biology but as a liminal moment of being in relation with those around us, as our being part of global supply chains, as a relational reverberation with uncomfortable histories? Familial and other ties are world-making, constitutive not mere context, they are beyond the dichotomies of good or bad, they have always been and always will be. It is about time we grapple with them, all of them.
We experience raw escapist beauty, clouds, flowers, bubbles, smiles. A young family in Japan creates cinematic memories during the liminal space of slowness brought on by the COVID pandemic, capturing moments that would otherwise slip by unnoticed in Radiance (2024), this condensing observation of the shortest moments mesmerizes. And yet, we can sense a peculiar tension. The harmonious togetherness of families is far out of reach for the iron factory workers in Yangon, Myanmar in In the Heat of the Fire (2023). As domestic labor migrants they are separated from their families for most of the year. Their memories of love and hopes for a better future for their children compete with an unbearable present.
A Thai filmmaker reflects on their own family history, echoing the experiences of many who have had (and continue) to migrate to Bangkok for work, tuning to histories in order to make sense of the present, Here We Are (2023) points to the violent reverberations of Thailand’s development into a modern nation on the shoulders of people from its newly defined peripheries that reflects on their own family history. And without interest in further consolidation in dualisms, The Trap (2024) dwells in the peripheries of modernization and offers a different gravitational pull, inviting us to experience and meditate on our eternal connection with nature through close encounters with animal companions along the waterways of a Colombian jungle. Water continues its elemental flow in The Good Omen (2024), a filmic journey that centers the beauty of the margins, the urgency of countering bureaucracies inability to cater to the precious livelihoods of the shepherd is noted but not given space. A strong refusal to hold cinematic space for destructive forces when there is so much to convey about the beauty of familial ties between people, elemental materials and landscape.
Docs Docs: Short! Series Familial and Other Ties is an invitation to the notion of family to dare itself and a rehearsal to gain ground elsewhere with care for those ties we might have neglected.
–Rosalia Namsai Engchuan
