Co-presented by Miao Collective and Critical Media Club, Soup and Memory is a two-series film screening event. There will be three documentaries from three Asian women filmmakers across the Pacific Ocean, spanning across two days. Each screening will be coupled with some hearty soups made by community chefs. 

October 21 (Monday): On October 21st, we will screen the Japanese-born Korean director Yang Yong-hi’s documentary Soup and Ideology (2021). As her mother’s memories of the April 3rd Jeju Island massacre surfaced, Yong-hi started to understand her mom’s position as a North Korean activist in Japan. In between the harsh moments, it was the Korean chicken soup that connected the family to the same dining table. Please be aware that the screening of Soup and Ideology has animated scenes of massacre memories and verbal narration of violence.

October 28 (Monday): On October 28th, we will screen the Singaporean artist Shirley Soh’s Remember, to Eat (2019) and Montreal-based Chinese Malaysian Canadian filmmaker Emily Gan’s Cavebirds (2019). Shirley asked the elderly residents of Telok Blangah: what recipe do you want to be remembered by, while Emily followed her father’s 10-year journey building the birdnest factory in Malaysia. Emily will be present in the lab for a Q&A session after the screening.

This is a free event opening to everyone. The soup/ food will be prepared by our community chefs, and will be served on a first-come-first-serve basis. We look forward to welcoming you at the critical media lab, sharing soup moments, and creating more memories together. 

Filmmaker Biographies:

Born in Osaka, Japan, Yang Yong-hi is a second generation “zainichi” Korean. In her early career, she worked as a freelance video journalist, making TV documentaries for NHK (Japan) and reporting as field reporter for TV Asahi’s News Station’s coverage in Thailand, Bangladesh, China and other Asian countries. Beginning in 1997, she spent six years in New York during which time she filmed various ethnic communities, and pursued a master’s degree in Media Studies from The New School in New York. After returning to Japan in 2003, she continues creating movies in her “one-self document style”.  She carries a camera, gathers materials, interviews people and structures a film all by herself. Her work has been shown and won awards at the Berlinale, Sundance Film Festival and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival among many others. 

Shirley Soh's art practice began with ceramics, a very tactile, craft-based medium, but she soon found its very grounding expanding her interests into agriculture, food, the environment, and ultimately, sustainability. Drawn to Buddhist contemplative practices, her current interests hope to integrate a more interdependent relationship between the external world and our inner being, community and the individual, and the body and mind. Shirley has grown plants, worked with migrant workers and women prisoners, created a retail shop, cooked with local communities, and meditated for her artwork.

Emily Gan is a filmmaker, photographer and yoga instructor based in Montréal, Canada, her hometown. The daughter of Overseas Chinese immigrants, her personal work primarily focuses on themes of home and diaspora. Emily received the Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award at Hot Docs 2019 for her debut feature documentary Cavebirds, which is now available globally on streaming platforms, including AppleTV+, and has also been adapted into a radio doc. Her first full-length fiction film Pink Lake, co-produced and co-directed with filmmaker and singer-songwriter Daniel Isaiah Schachter, premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2020. Emily is currently working on another feature-length drama and a short experimental horror doc.

Credits:
Picture from Emily Gan, Cavebirds (2019)
Poster design by Yiran Zhao
Curated by Audrey Jiang at Miao Collective

Location: Critical Media Lab, Peterson Hall, Room 108