Wavelengths 1: House and Home

Across these six films the nature of an abode is examined through its connections with privilege, family, memory, objects, and state control. Reflecting on shelters both fixed and temporary, these films explore the limits of refuge and the connection between people and place.

A coda to his 2024 Festival selection Being John Smith and a rumination-in-miniature, Two Pids is English avant-garde legend John Smith’s reflection on the fleeting roles we play and the temporary places we occupy. In the elegant, dreamlike After Image, local filmmaker Rita Ferrando similarly considers her family’s history of migration from Argentina to Canada by way of archival fragments and a conversation across time with her artist grandfather.

Family is also the core of Moon Palace by Chinese filmmaker Jiaqi Yu. Both grounded and cosmic, the film conjures a (non-)space that connects his loved ones across different realms. Yu’s open, porous space is contrasted with Danaya Chulphuthiphong’s examination of enclosure, with her poetic, tactile Microcosmic Orbit: Encased presenting containers of both plants and people, asking how such barriers might not only protect but stifle. 

The titular index in The Address Book, by Montreal-based Turkish artist Mustafa Uzuner, belonged to the American iconoclast artist and recluse Joseph Cornell, and as we progress through its pages it not only figuratively maps out a constellation of artists — among them Yayoi Kusama and Carolee Schneemann — but also their geographical location in mid-century Manhattan. 

The programme closes with Natalia Marín’s quietly yet resolutely incensed Chronicle of Tiredness, tracing the connections between capitalism, precarious housing, gendered discrimination, and intergenerational poverty in an urgent defence of the chronically exploited. 

JESSE CUMMING