The path of making abstract cinema with intimate personal matters and/or cultural and historical content can be a tug of war between the explicit and implicit. What does a safe space look like? What boundaries can be set for one’s vulnerability? Guided by instincts, Erica Sheu’s films do not look for solutions but instead find answers along the way.
Acropolis Cinema is pleased to host an evening of Sheu's short films and video works, many on 16mm, bookended by a pair of expanded cinema experiences (the second featuring live musical accompaniment). Looking at her filmography from 2017 to present, we see cross-cultural collisions on a New York subway to the gentle observations of interior living, triggered by the pandemic, to intimate collaborations in a post-COVID world.
Erica Sheu/徐璐 makes short films, expanded cinema, and installations with small gauge celluloid film. Her short films explore the synesthetic qualities of memory, guided by feelings and emotions. Different themes include new forms of diary films, pure cinema, languages, cathartic handwriting, cross-generational memories, Taiwanese history, and identity politics.
Introduction by Elenie Chung. Program notes by Erica Sheu unless otherwise indicated.
Program:
A Short History (Erica Sheu, 2017)
2 x 16mm projection, silent, color and b&w, 3 min
An anonymous narrator reflects on their national history as it forms and collapses their identity. They shift back and forth between two reels of 16mm found footage.
the way home (Erica Sheu, 2018)
super 8 to digital, sound, b&w, 3 min
On the subway, a woman asked me how to go home. Distantly, we talked about our home on our way home.
transcript (Erica Sheu, 2019)
35mm to digital, silent, color, 3 min
A film on intimacy. The filmmaker transcribes feelings on film and cyanotype paper with baby's-breath flowers, their shadow, and old love letters from her father to her mother.
pài-lak ē-poo (Erica Sheu, 2020)
16mm, optical soundtrack, color, 2 min
A half-moon on the blue sky. A quiet offering connects the unreachable world with the physical earth. A Japanese childhood song comes in the wind. In Taiwanese, we promised Grandma that the next time we visit is Saturday afternoon. pài-lak ē-poo means Saturday afternoon in Taiwanese Holouē.
birthday song (single channel) (Erica Sheu, 2021)
16mm, digital stereo sound, color, 3 min
I wanted to make a film for my birthday / I wrote down as many notes as I could / until I couldn't keep up / I started to film but nothing interested me / I decided to print and cut / and thought of Interior Scroll / I pulled a long strip out / and used it as a bookmark
off (I don’t know when to stop) (Erica Sheu, 2021)
super 8 to digital, sound, color, 3 min
Day after day, bars of sunset pass the kitchen. Lamps carry on when the sky gets dark. The frame finds its balance. Life in work and work in life.
Grandma’s Scissors (Erica Sheu, 2021)
super 8 to digital, silent, color, 6 min
Guided by the words of her grandmother, the filmmaker explores the synesthetic properties of memory. Images give way to haptic experience via a range of textures—of sea, celluloid, paper, and pencil traces, of raindrops drifting in and out of focus—linking the arts of textiles and montage into a shared artisanal tradition. — Leo Goldsmith, NYFF
Fur Film vol.2: mirror mirror (ЯeaRflex, 2022)
Super 8 and 16mm to digital, sound, color and b&w, 16 min
"Fur film" is literal translation from 毛片, which means dailies/footage. This is an exchange diary between tz, jc, es of ЯeaRflex, a taiwanese experimental filmmaker group.
It follows It passes on (Erica Sheu, 2022)
16mm to digital, sound, color and b&w, 5.5 min
This film creates a container for a private ritual to reconnect to Kinmen, a Taiwanese island, during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1960s. The filmmaker reimagines her father’s childhood war experience with the sparse memories he shared with her. The light was reenacted, and the spirits were summoned. A tender gaze attempts to look through and experience beyond the light glares as if understanding a silent parent in the crack of the historical events.
False Expectations (Erica Sheu, 2023)
3 x 16mm, digital stereo sound, color and b&w, 10 min
False Expectations is a 3-channel 16mm expanded cinema with a scored live noise performance. Finding and preserving memories of connections and tenderness in dead flowers, in between blinds, slants of shadows and hand-processed film frames.
TRT: 55 min
In person: Erica Sheu
"In [pài-lak ē-poo], Erica Sheu constructs a touching elegy for her grandmother, an unadorned yet robust catalog of light and the clear blue sky around it. Like a life, the film appears for a miraculous moment and vanishes before we have time to say goodbye." —Maximilien Luc Proctor, Screen Slate
"[With Transcript], Erica Sheu portraits an attempt to the perpetual, as an impulse of desire that arises to grasp life and love in a condensed light phenomena... Sheu’s film is a rite of an intimate timeless preservation of love, driven by desire, taking light as the key element for her transcendental purposes." —Ivonne Sheen, desistfilm
"It follows It passes on is a grainy 16 mm miniature... In her note about the film, [Sheu] quotes Canadian poet Anne Carson who writes, “A wound gives off its own light.” Here, the wound stretches across a whole country. It is the filmmaker’s duty to follow it, to create a world of elegy and grieving that is also a hymn to new ways of seeing." —Mike Hoolbloom, Panorama-cinéma
"As visually sumptuous as any film in [the 2019 Wavelenths] selection... While certain of its sources are obvious enough, Transcript is nonetheless an object of such casually refined construction that there is no reason to think of anything but the pleasures of its form as it unspools, pleasures which happily live on as more than faint traces in memory." —Phil Coldiron, Filmmaker Magazine
"One of the most delicate films in [the 2023 Wavelengths] program may also be the most exquisite. In its sheer variety of visual forms and textures, It follows It passes on at times resembles certain works by Stan Brakhage, especially The Riddle of Lumen (1972), but Sheu’s attention to the smallest cadences of light can perhaps best be described as calligraphic." —Michael Sicisnki, MUBI Notbeook
(Available to download after screening date)