In Translation is a short experimental film exploring memory and loss through the act of burning as a visual and cultural metaphor.
Category
Film, Video
Date
Winter 2020
Overview
Aside from exploring film montage and new video production techniques, I wanted to engage with my own experiences surrounding joss paper. Also known as “spirit money”, these material goods are made accessible to spirits through the practice of burning joss paper — if film is memory's material form, could it undergo a similar transformation?
Annie Wong's article called “How to Burn Paper for the Dead” was a key text for this film, in which she writes: “In the fragmented landscape of the diasporic subject, the benevolent Eastern spirit becomes an eerie Western haunting...what is kindred is instead experienced as a loss.”