LIST of Videos and Short Art Movies:
2011 Lost Light
2011 Chinese Cinderella Ye Xian
2010 One minute Silence
2008 Zhu (a bad omen)
2008 Order of the President
2008 Feng Huang
2006 Wind
2005 Circle of Life
2005 Reality
2005 Dream
2005 Humble Beginnings
2005 Sounds and Ultrasounds
2004 Movement
2004 Connections
1991 Sea memory (co-produced with
Andrej Kratky)
Chinese Cinderella Ye Xian — 2011 | 13 min
A short film I completed in 2011, a bitter Cinderella story for China.
Ye Xian is Cinderella in an ancient Chinese story (850 AD). The film is set in modern China and questions the value put on women, when girls are aborted, killed and neglected. The shortage of local women feeds an illegal trade, forcing foreign trafficked girls into marriage and prostitution.
The film questions the value of women in today's China and how it has changed over centuries, as intriguing comparisons are drawn between the ancient practice of binding women's feet to a highly prized "three inch golden lotus," and the ideal of the Cinderella shoe.
Ye Xian is one of the oldest known versions of the Cinderella story - recorded nearly a thousand years before the tale most of the world knows, Charles Perrault's 1697 French version that became Disney's Cinderella. In the original, there is no fairy godmother: Ye Xian's dead mother is reincarnated as a golden fish that watches over her, and when the fish is killed, its bones become the source of her transformation. The shoe that gives her away is gold, not glass - and it is her tiny foot, not a fairy-tale fit, that marks her as exceptional, foreshadowing an ideal that would later be carved into women's bodies rather than simply worn on their feet.
Even the ending resists the comfort of the Western telling. Where western Cinderella closes on forgiveness and a wedding, the earliest recorded Ye Xian ends without that same mercy - the stepmother and stepsister are killed, crushed by falling stones. Beneath the fairy tale sits a harder story: a woman's worth measured, shaped, and ultimately settled by forces outside her control. It is that unresolved bitterness, not the happy ending audiences expect, that the film carries into the present.
One Minute Silence — 2010 | 10 min
Silence has often been portrayed in my work as a strong expression. To stay still and absorb the tranquility that the quiet moment offers. It is a look at people's faces. It shows how we fill up any silence with noise, with empty games, how advertising penetrates and changes the way we think.
A minute of silence is usually reserved for mourning, for remembrance, a ritual pause the world agrees to observe together. Here, that same pause becomes something else, a mirror held up to the ordinary noise we live inside without noticing. The film sets empty, noisy television programs, high-pitched voices chattering over nothing, against silence underwater, filmed in aquariums and in Chinese restaurants, where the noise drops away and something quieter takes over.
What the film asks is simple and uncomfortable, can we tolerate quiet at all, or has noise, commercial noise, chatter, the constant hum of being sold to, become the condition we mistake for normal? Advertising doesn't just interrupt silence, it colonizes it, teaching us to expect it to be filled. One Minute Silence offers the opposite, a descent from the noisy surface into the quiet underwater, where nothing is being sold, nothing is being said, only stillness left to hold.
More to come, the site is still under construction.
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