Doors Medley + When Forever Dies(RTRFH 2022)

Movie Name: Doors Medley
Language: Cantonese (in part) (Chinese & English subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 7 minutes
Director: Linda Lai Chiu-han
Story: It is a re-mix and extension of Lai’s two existing works Door Game (2005) and Door Games Window Frames (2012). The original sources are videos from 11 Cantonese melodrama released in the 1960s. They were turned into a large number of video fragments and reassembled. On the basis of dismantling the formula of 1950s-60s Cantonese film melodrama in the previous works, it further reveals the gender paradigms embedded in popular culture.

Linda Lai Chiu-han (1957-)
Lai (Ph.D, NYU Cinema Studies), Associate Professor (intermedia arts) at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media, is a scholar cum research-based interdisciplinary artist focusing on historiographic experiments which often involve found footage and video diaries. She had her solo retrospective at the Experimental Film/Video Festivals in Macau, Seoul and Cordoba, Spain. Her video works are archived by M and Video Bureau. She was awarded Hong Kong Arts Development Council's ‘Artist of the Year 2017 – Media Art’.

Movie Name: When Forever Dies
Language: No Dialogue (English intertitles & Chinese subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 109 minutes
Director: Peet Gelderblom
Original Music: Pieter Straatman, Kettel and Man After Midnight Story: Forever Him and Forever Her, the two lovers are inseparable over 120 years and more, travelling through light and shadows, from being passionately in love to entangled in hate. Made of more than 100 films, this archival fiction is a mixture of reedited fragments of footage, many of which come from the ‘Bits & Pieces' Collection’ of the Eye Filmmuseum. The shots and scenes belonged to unidentified materials, including newsreels, animation, advertisements, experimental films and more. Among the precious compilation that spans a century’s moving images is Eadweard Muybridg’s The Horse in Motion, which dates back to 1878, and recent works like Skelehellavision (2002) by experimental filmmaker Martha Colburn. To best retain the footage in their original shapes and forms, the film shifts between aspect ratios according to their individual sources. Each frame is scanned and colour corrected digitally to restore the hand-painting, stencil coloring, tinting, toning and early Technicolor features.

Peet Gelderblom
Gelderblom is an award winning director and editor from the Netherlands with over 25 years of experience in films, commercials, documentaries, drama, television, video essays and online content. He’s a sharp visual storyteller and conceptual thinker. With his keen sense of style, mood, drama, musical timing and graphic eye for composition, Peet is an expert at giving audio-visual content the exact look and feel it needs.

^Pre-screening Introduction; Online talk by Linda Lai Chiu-han and Peet Gelderblom (in English)