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The Sojourn

Tiffany Sia

2023 00:32:00 United StatesChinese, English, MandarinColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Expedition/Travel, Indigenous, Landscape, Language, Memory, Nature

Description

Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, The Sojourn imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. He counsels on the perfect conditions of mist and weather. Yet, in the journey through the mountains of Dayuling, the sublime landscape of King Hu remains ever elusive. She later visits the elementary school of Indigenous filmmaker and principal Pilin Yapu of the Atayal tribe. Absent of conventional subtitles, the essay film employs text burned into the center of the frame as a mode of translation, sometimes refusing total disclosure.

Available for educational use. Please contact VDB for screening and exhibition requests.

About Tiffany Sia

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born in Hong Kong and currently living in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. The artist and filmmaker has previously had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Italy; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, and LUX Moving Image. Her first collection of essays, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, was published by Primary Information in 2024. In 2024, Sia was the recipient of the Baloise Art Prize, and in 2022, the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award. The artist and filmmaker’s work at its core challenges genre. Working across mediums, Sia’s multidisciplinary practice materializes across multiple forms from films, video sculptures, artist books, scholarly essays and more. Her work blends nonfiction with poetics and theoretical inquiry, and her visual explorations confront questions about representation of place and memory. Sia’s ongoing conceptual occupation lies within the struggle to represent historical time, geography and the limits of official records.