Lens/Visions
Presented by Union Gallery, Curated by Roy Zheng
Film presents unique possibilities to document and expand our vision and imagination. It transports our awareness to other places, times and positionalities. Filmmaking has always been expansive and challenging, yet often monopolized by major Hollywood studios. Thanks to the advancement of digital technologies now at our fingertips, we are capable of creating visual and distributable content as a kind of second-hand cinema, as a means to creatively structure our narratives and accent our perspectives.
Short films are democratic;
Short films are unique, insightful and intuitive;
We make short films to celebrate our passions for life,
to confront the problems that we all live with,
to empower ignored and marginalized voices,
to display our creativities, knowledges and critical visions.
Lens/Visions features eleven short films and video projects that re-examine pasts, presents and futures
through broad and ranging narratives of nostalgia, environmentalism, mental health, conflicting and nourishing relationships, and apocalyptic realities. Film styles and approaches include short-docs, poetic renderings and experimental production.
Lens/Visions filmmakers and artists include Queen’s University students, recent graduates and collaborators: Jung-Ah Kim, Lexie Braden, Ming Xing + Siyang Hu, 龍少爺 Dragon Lords, Lauren Thomas + Francesca Lim, Albert Yuou Liu, Austin Benson, Kushan Samarawickrema, James P. Hoban, Posy Legge + Kitz Willman, and The Westkitz Watershed. Curated by Roy Zheng, Union Gallery Curatorial Assistant.
Lens/Visions was livestreamed via Union Gallery’s Facebook on November 12-13, 2020.
Livestream Begins: 7pm Screening: 7:30–9pm
Lens/Visions is organized into two guiding thematics: Mobile Lens and Critical Visions. Each screening will be led by curator’s introductions and followed by live Q&A with the artists and filmmakers. Lens/Visions is a platform,
a portal, a point of entry. Please enjoy the show.
Virtual Screening Program
Mobile Lens
Thursday, November 12 Livestream begins: 7pm Screening: 7:30-9pm
Keu-ri-seu-ma-seu (Jung-Ah Kim, 7 min, 2019)
Fen and Moor (Lexie Braden, 2 min, 2020)
Lahu in the Clouds (Ming Xing + Siyang Hu, 11 min, 2020)
Deadly Shapes of Shaolin (龍少爺 Dragon Lords, 9 min, 2020)
The Wolfe Island Windmills (Lauren Thomas + Francesca Lim, 5 min, 2020)
Second Chance + Second Chance Alternative Ending (Albert Yuou Liu, 4 min, 2019)
Critical Visions
Friday, November 13 Livestream begins: 7pm Screening: 7:30-9pm
Squander (Austin Benson, 9 min, 2020)
Lockdown Paradox (Kushan Samarawickrema, 8 min, 2020)
Dinner (James P. Hoban, 6 min, 2020)
Spurs on in the Insinger Church (Posy Legge + Kitz Willman, 10 min, 2020) goalie gets a mask/cigarette strings (The Westkitz Watershed, 7 min, 2020)
Photo Gallery
Lens/Visions Review by Tyler Adair
Image: 龍少爺 Dragon Lords, Deadly Shapes of Shaolin (video still), 2020. Courtesy of the artists.
Dispatches from the Lens/Visions virtual screening
There is something both strange and exhilarating about the experience of attending digital film festivals forced to migrate online by the COVID-19 pandemic. While some critics have welcomed the respite from shuffling from screening to screening—or leaving the house at all—the future of film exhibition remains uncertain, to be determined by our ability to arrest the global spread of the virus.
Moreover, from our vantage point, all films, whether they engage with it directly or not, have become about the pandemic—whether as traces of a way of life or an experience of reality which has now disappeared, or worse, as harbingers of more bad things to come. And yet, historically, the cinema has always been impelled by crisis, whether aesthetic, social, political, or technological, and as the digital means of production continue to become more accessible, new—often amateur—filmmakers are converted to the medium daily, empowered to take up the lens in order to respond to these exigencies.
This was certainly the case in the inaugural program of Lens/Visions, a student film virtual screening, which held the character of a festival, curated by Roy Zheng. Transformed into an exhibition, Lens/Visions is on display at Union Gallery until December 18, 2020. The screening, which was initially broadcast live on Facebook last month, showcases eleven short works by Queen’s University students while also attempting to preserve the collectivity and spontaneity which remain so crucial to the practice of cinephilia.
A common environmentalist thread weaved through the Mobile Lens program on night one—namely, a desire for communion with the earth and, equally, respite from the dulling effects of modernity and its alienating metropolises.
In Fen and Moor and Spurs on in the Insinger Church, both improvised site-specific films, Lexi Braden, Posy Legge, and Kitz Willman expertly use music and dance to facilitate an exchange of affects, gestures, and sounds between site—Yukon and rural Saskatchewan, respectively—performer, and audience. Meanwhile, Ming Xing and Siyang Hu ascend the mountains of Yunnan, China to document the daily rituals of the indigenous Lahu peoples in their pastoral Lahu in the Clouds while Jung-Ah Kim, wrestling with loneliness and double consciousness, offers up a variegated image of Chicago-as-hellscape in Keu-ri-seu-ma-seu.
As predicted, the present health crisis was front and centre in the Critical Visions program.
James P. Hoban’s Dinner, which shares its formal conceit with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope—unfolding in a single take, uses its multilayered soundtrack and vertiginous cinematography to craft a work of tremendous emotional power. Similarly, Kushan Samarwickrema’s Lockdown Paradox sardonically mocks the irony of normalizing what is otherwise considered neurotic or pathological behaviour to mitigate the effects of the virus.
Fearing an ironized, post-Tarantino excursion, I was pleasantly surprised by the screening’s standout film: 龍少爺 Dragon Lords’ Deadly Shapes of Shaolin which boasts both beautiful, verdant landscapes and remarkably choreographed—almost balletic—fight sequences which pay homage to the Kung Fu films of Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest. I was especially shocked to discover one of its creators is still in high school!
I anticipatedly await next year’s program. My only hope is to be truly present.
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Tyler Adair is an independent writer and curator from St. Catharines, Ontario. He is a recent graduate of the MA program in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University and during his tenure as a graduate student, he was part of the curatorial team for Garden Studies which ran from September-December 2020 at Queen’s University’s Agnes Etherington Art Centre. He also holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Brock University where he completed his undergraduate degree in Art History and Film Studies, and his scholarly interests include film theory, modernist painting, Marxism, and curatorial studies. He continues to research the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet.