Curated by: Annie Wong

This shorts program couples Batoul Faour’s Shafāfiyyāh and Daphne Xu’s A Thousand-Year Stage to consider how urban infrastructures in cities as disparate as Beirut and Xiongan New Area, can function as sites where memory, power, and refusal consistently collide in the geographies of everyday life.

In the immediate aftermath of the devastating explosion in August 2020, the city of Beirut was blanketed by glass debris. The disaster, triggered by a neglected, state-owned chemical warehouse, made transparent the corruption of Lebanon’s political elite, deepening civil unrest against the country’s sectarian rule. In Shafāfiyyāh (“transparency” in Arabic), Faour looks to the materiality of glass – its sound, transparency, and weight – as a language for past and recurrent traumas in the collective memory of Beirut. Using the essay-film format, Faour refuses a position of neutrality, politicizing the glass fragments of the city from the explosion to the glass lens of the camera.

In April 2018, the President of China announced the ambitious “Thousand-Year Project” that would transform the rural region of Xiong’an New Area, located 100km south of Beijing, into the next megacity. In A Thousand-Year Stage, filmmaker Daphne Xu captures the liminal condition of rural life at the cusp of rapid urbanization. As a high-speed rail station cuts across the landscape, local residents and migrant workers engage in live-stream performances and communal karaoke, while laboring and loitering on the train plazas and construction sites. These new spaces become the stage where contemporary rural Chinese life takes shape in the transient period before urbanization takes hold.

These new spaces become the stage where rural contemporary Chinese life takes shape in the transient period before the advent of urbanization.