The Sojourn
Short Films
•
31m
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2023 • 32 minutes
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.
Please note this film specifically does not include subtitles or a caption file.
Up Next in Short Films
-
A Child Already Knows
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2024 • 33 minutes
“A Child Already Knows” is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of approp...
-
Roads of Lava
Directed by Gretel Marin • Documentary • 2024 • 28 minutes
Afibola—a Black, queer, feminist activist and poet—lives with her eight-year-old son Olorun in downtown Havana, Cuba. Moving between the safety of their modest home and the uncertainty of the streets outside, Afibolo reflects on the comp...
-
Los Puros (The Pure Ones)
Directed by Carla Valdés León • Documentary • 2024 • 19 minutes
A group of old friends reunite at a summer house in Varadero, Cuba. Their last meeting was in Minsk, mid-1980s: they were preparing to return home to Cuba after five years spent studying Marxist-Leninist philosophy in the Soviet Uni...
