The Sojourn
Tiffany Sia
•
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 Tiffany Sia
-
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...
-
What Rules the Invisible
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2022 • 10 minutes
What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upends archival travelogue footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows trop...
-
Do Not Circulate
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2021 • 17 minutes
Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film directed by Tiffany Sia, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips fo...
