Southeast Asian Shorts: Palimpsests
About the programme
Southeast Asia is a landscape that is continually being re-written. Histories of colonialism, dictatorship and migration linger in the present, akin to a palimpsest, where older inscriptions remain faintly visible beneath the new.
The short films in this programme treat memory as layered terrain, sedimented in rivers, embedded in creative practice, refracted through propaganda, or rewritten through personal fantasy. Together, they reveal Southeast Asia not as a singular history, but as an accumulation of erasures and returns, where the past is neither resolved nor distant, but persistently inscribed onto bodies, landscapes, and images.
A Metamorphosis (အသွင်ပြောင်းလဲမှုတစ်ခု, 2025, Lin Htet Aung)
Director: Lin Htet Aung
Runtime: 16 mins
Country: Myanmar
Language: Burmese with English subtitles
Rating: PG13
Synopsis
What’s left in a media landscape when it is ravaged by state propaganda? In A Metamorphosis, the visual and sonic language of Burmese state television is reworked into a disquieting, yet subversive, counter-broadcast. Remixing absurd, uncanny images that shaped his childhood under dictatorship, the film distorts familiar compositions and narratives of state messages, transforming them into warped echoes of memory, estranged and unsettling.
The Key to the Past (2025, Hafiz Rancajale, Otty Widasari, Helmi Yusron, Syarifa Amira)
Director: Hafiz Rancajale, Otty Widasari, Helmi Yusron, Syarifa Amira
Runtime: 12 mins
Country: Indonesia
Language: Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles
Rating: PG
Synopsis
The Ciliwung River is redirected by the Manggarai Water Gate, a structure that stands as a silent witness to the currents of history. Having endured both colonial rule and independence, it bears the layered traces of time. Through the narrations of two teenagers, the city is read from what the river leaves behind: fragments of its former past, drifting rubbish, and the remnants of lives carried downstream.
Sparrow in a Storm (Pipit Dalam Badai, 2023, Van Luber Parensen)
Director: Van Luber Parensen
Runtime: 22 mins
Country: Indonesia
Language: Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles
Rating: PG
Synopsis
A plume of white fog bursts from the tube of a man’s fumigator. A pair of hands turns the pages of a book filled with unknown plant species. These scenes are taken from the daily life of a botanist, who attempts to interest his children in his scientific work. Set to the gentle rhythms of scientific labour and domestic routines, the film is accompanied by a letter from Pramoedya’s fictional character Miriam de la Croix, who expresses compassion for those who suffered in the Dutch East Indies under colonial rule.
The film reinterprets Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartets, which were banned under Suharto, as Pramoedya was held as a political prisoner for his relation to the Indonesian Communist Party. In doing so, filmmaker Van Luber Parensen reveals how modern research and notions of progress in the Indies were inseparable from the structures of colonial power.
Mary, Mary So Contrary (2019, Nelson Yeo)
Director: Nelson Yeo
Runtime: 15 mins
Country: Singapore
Language: Mandarin, English with English subtitles
Rating: PG
Synopsis
In a hellish landscape, a disembodied voice calls out: “Ma Li… Ma Li… Do you still remember me?”
In Nelson Yeo’s Mary Mary So Contrary, personal footage and classical films fuse together in a phantasmagorical haze of fleeting faces and elusive figures. Yeo constructs a hallucinatory portrait of Ma Li, a Chinese woman who dreams of inhabiting the body and life of a Caucasian woman, Mary. The experimental short interrogates racialised identity and the cinematic manufacturing of desire.
Mangosteen (2023, Tulapop Saenjaroen)
Director: Tulapop Saenjaroen
Runtime: 40 mins
Country: Thailand
Language: Thai, German with English subtitles
Rating: PG
Synopsis
Mangosteen follows Earth, a young man who returns to his hometown to help at his sister’s fruit processing factory. As he attempts to reinsert himself into the rhythms of family labour, he realises that his idea of “the future” diverges sharply from his sister’s pragmatic vision. The more he lingers among factory floors and orchards, the more displaced he feels. Gradually, Earth retreats into writing, crafting a chaotic and irrational novel that mirrors his own restless imagination.
This screening is part of the programme Prasasti / Inscriptions: Unearthing Intertwined Legacies. For more screenings of this programme. Please click here.
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