Sino-phone Focus I : Body and Landscape

Italo Calvino once pondered that time manifests visibly in the city, where architecture and monuments endure as fossils of humanity’s shared odyssey, beckoning remembrance and compassion.

“Body and Landscape” presents four dance films woven into diverse urban realms, where dancers wander through cityscapes seeking intimate dialogue with fragments of history buried within.  Macau Blank Diary unfolds at Macau’s Praça de Ponte e Horta, once the Qing Dynasty’s inaugural opium pier and fiscal stronghold, transformed through time from bustling dock to teahouse, from vibrant marketplace to tranquil refuge.  The Lost Note inhabits Taiwan’s enigmatic Japanese-era edifices, where the director wields tension-filled montage, deliberately misaligning sound and vision to evoke dissonant harmonies that shadow the dancer’s elegant movements.  A City, A Body and A House follows Hong Kong artists across 9,450 kilometers to Kortrijk, tracing cross-cultural echoes of growth, displacement, and emotional resonance in this distant European enclave.  Loop/Hole returns to Hong Kong’s tong lau tenements, where dance unfurls in labyrinthine corridors, revealing how body and lens alchemize everyday spaces into dreamlike visions.

Dance transmutes into the body’s land art, subtly infiltrating the city’s rhythmic breath before merging with the landscape itself. These films unveil fresh portals for beholding the city’s hidden soul and whispered mysteries.