NOWNESS ASIA x Potato Head Film Series - Program #2

Directed by Rose Ng (AU)

This episode in the NOWNESS original portraits series “They Call Me…” introduces us to Oshiruko Chan, a forever-17-year-old free-spirited Perfect Sweetheart. Oshiruko is an original character created by a Tokyo-based costume performance artist and professional mask-maker who prefers to remain anonymous. He performs as a DJ in the local underground music scene under the name and persona of “Oshiruko”, donning an animegao-like mask of his own making. But Oshiruko is more than a costume – she is an extension of her maker and represents, in her brightness and hyper-femininity, the things that he otherwise “could never be.”

Directed by Lei Lei (CH)

A fluoroscopy bus carries the crowd from the centre to the city's edge. In the fixed and crowded carriage, some passengers just boarding the bus collide with each other, and some passengers are taking a nap in their seats. The film uses symbolism to compare a closed system to a bus, and depicts passengers in alienation and surveillance from a microscopic perspective.

Directed by David Tse (Aus)

Loneliness and longing collide in this haunted nocturnal vision of a desolate Melbourne. A Japanese man lovingly tends to a house full of plants. A Chinese immigrant wears a penguin costume at work due to social anxiety. And a kidnapper bonds with the hostage she keeps locked up in a suitcase. Melbourne has never looked so mysterious as in this 16 mm-shot, vaporwave/shoegaze-scored shrine to solitude steeped in classic Wong Kar-wai, early Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (MIFF 2002 & 2023).

Directed by Kathleen Malay (ID)

Travel to Desa Les in Bali, Indonesia, for a special dinner gathering where a thoughtful meal reveals the wondrous fabric of shared traditions and memories. Kathleen Malay directs the series premiere of SUPPERCLUB, NOWNESS ASIA’s new original series celebrating regional cuisines through the memories and stories of a group of food lovers, shared in authentic conversations over a carefully crafted meal. Malay travels to North Bali where a beloved chef and Hindu priest is experimenting with the elements at the heart of a traditional Balinese kitchen. At dinner time in his kitchen, a familiar group of Indonesian artists and writers gathers to reminisce about intertwined memories of food and discuss the “sophistication of the margins.

Directed by Natasha Tontey (ID)

Garden Amidst the Flame is a coming-of-age story featuring the fantasy of a young Minahasan girl, presented in a non-linear time structure. The journey begins when the young protagonist Virsay shaves her eyebrows with her younger sister in an unemotional display of hypermasculinity of Minahasan culture. Without knowing that her younger sister is a member of the child gang that practises ancient knowledges, she encounters a realm of nowhere with the sudden appearance of a living fossil, the Coelacanth monster, on her bed, Rooster beast dancing in her room when the child gang beheads it. Other fantastical and absurd situations unfold.

Garden Amidst the Flame is written after Tontey participated in a Karai ritual. The sublime immaterial experience of digging, participating and observing her ancestral culture inspired this work. Experiment and research mutate into a fantasy film. The characters interact with each other to think about a new method of speculative care, as an idea to oppose the hypermasculine presentation of Minahasan ritual culture and everyday life.