16th Glasgow Short Film Festival – Asian Presence 2023

By Asian Film Festival on March 17, 2023 • ( Leave a comment )

We take a look at the Asian films that will be screened at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (Scotland) which will take place from March 22 – 26, 2023.

**All the Things You Leave Behind** by Chanasorn Chaikitiporn – Thailand | 2022 – 18 minutes

Thailand’s strategic position and political orientation made it the ideal ally for the United States during the Vietnam war. Through an astonishing mix of contemporary and archival images, the film deploys precise criticism to analyse a little-known page of modern history, emblematic of contemporary power games and warfare. (GSFF2023)

Trailer:

**Embers from Yesterday, Aflame** by William Hong-xiao Wei – UK | 2022 – 11 minutes

A transcendental meditation on withered trees struggling to be reborn. A fleeting glimpse into the seemingly trivial occurrences of daily life. A sheer ecstasy of physical intimacy viewed through celluloid films, in which the life of the emulsion is decaying: during the lockdown, film footages were “disinfected” by disinfectant, surface cleanser and hand sanitiser gel, specifically, household chemicals which were alleged to “kill 99.9% of bacteria and viruses”, and which helped us prevent the spread of coronavirus. Returning images that have shapes to the shapeless, in the physical fragility of the cinematic medium, allows for the viewer’s hallucinatory perception of matter in a state of continual creation and dissolution. Through the evocation of the tension between transience and continuity, the film unfolds the dialectic of destruction and metamorphosis. (GSFF2023)

**Persona** by Sujin Moon – Korea | 2022 – 7 minutes

The process of being encroached by the persona. (GSFF2023)

Trailer:

**The Wind Carries Us Home** by Udval Altangerel – Mongolia, USA | 2022 – 11 minutes

Through rituals of birth and death, the filmmaker and her family reconnect with their ancestral land in the Gobi Desert. (GSFF2023)

**True Places** by Gloria Chung – USA | 2022 – 7 minutes

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Places that exist at the border(s) of memory and physical terrain. (GSFF2023)

**White Ant** by Shalini Adnani – India, UK | 2023 – 15 minutes

Ashish, a middle-aged businessman, is called back to his now abandoned childhood home, where he is confronted with a colony of termites eating the house from the inside out. (GSFF2023)

Trailer:

**Will You Look At Me** by Shuli Huang – China | 2022 – 20 minutes

As a young Chinese filmmaker returns to his hometown in search of himself, a long overdue conversation with his mother plunges the two of them into a quest for acceptance and love. (GSFF2023)

Trailer: