Closing night

Sunday, October 20
︎ 18:00-20:30
︎ Theatre at MAC Birmingham

KORYO-SARAM AND CHINESE LIVERPUDLIANS: STORIES OF EAST ASIAN FORCED DISPLACEMENT IN THE USSR AND THE UK

THE UNDESIRABLES by Hester Yang (19 mins) 
THREE BORDERS by Alisa Berger (55 mins)
+ Q&A (60 mins)

︎ Tickets

Screening Rights Film Festival is bringing the latest socially engaged and formally innovative cinema from the Global South to audiences in the West Midlands. The closing night of its 10th-anniversary edition, subtitled Double Bill and aimed at fostering South-to-South solidarity, features The Undesirables, Hester Yang’s short about the Chinese Liverpudlians, alongside Three Borders, Alisa Berger’s mid-length essay about the (post-)Soviet Koreans.

THE UNDESIRABLES
Hester Yang / 2022 / UK / 19’ / English with English subtitles

Hester Yang’s short film The Undesirables unpacks the traumatic and long-classified history of the Chinese men who were working as dockers in Liverpool during World War II. When the war ended, they were deemed no longer necessary, made redundant, and deported to China overnight, leaving behind families and children they had fathered in Liverpool. Similarly to some of the other works of artistic research at this year’s Screening Rights — Dancing Palestine and Sebastia Disagreement — The Undesirables was realised as part of an MA project (specifically, an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography that the filmmaker undertook at the University of the Arts London). It organically combines extensive archival work and interviews with the descendants of the sailors, conducted by Yang in Liverpool, alongside images of water as metaphors for seafaring, migration, and displacement. The film has toured extensively across the UK, including screenings in Liverpool (Open Eye Gallery), Manchester (esea contemporary), and London (the New Contemporaries show at the Camden Arts Centre), and is now being presented in Birmingham for the first time.

Hester Yang is a London-based filmmaker, photographer, and emerging curator with a particular interest in alternative means of documentary storytelling.

THREE BORDERS
Alisa Berger / 2017 / Germany / 55’ / English, Russian, German with English subtitles

In her hypnotic, labyrinthine mid-length film essay Three Borders, Alisa Berger, a Germany-based filmmaker of Korean and Jewish descent, tackles her intricate family history that spans multiple countries and the turbulent history of the 20th century. Intriguingly for this screening, Berger recounts the story of her mother, Tatjana, who is Koryo-saram — a Soviet Korean. In 1937, Koryo-saram were forcibly displaced from the Far East of the Russian SSR to Central Asia as part of a secret racist operation launched by Stalin’s government, which was rearranging multiple populations and indigenous peoples due to perceived “anti-Soviet activities”. Realised in monochrome and subdued colours, and utilising material archives and oral testimonies, Three Borders highlights the plurality of diasporic experiences and the lesser-known, suppressed narratives of racialised displacement in the USSR. Originally conceived as part of a larger media installation, it is being shown in the UK for the first time.

Alisa Berger is a filmmaker of Korean and Jewish descent, who was born in Dagestan, raised in Ukraine, and is now based in Germany. She creates films and installations, often through a collaborative process, which are accompanied by, created, altered, or destroyed during performative interventions.

The screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion, featuring guest curators Misha Zakharov, Fangyuan Zhao, and Qinghan Chen, as well as the filmmakers Hester Yang and Alisa Berger. 

TRACING THE UNMOURNED PHANTOM IN AN ERASED HISTORY:
QINGHAN CHEN RESPONDS TO HESTER YANG’S THE UNDESIRABLES

In The Undesirables, Hester Yang shifts the focus to the families of the unwelcome Chinese seamen. These Eurasian descendants emphasise that although they look Chinese, they do not speak Mandarin and do not understand Chinese culture. I felt a sense of Chineseness hovering around these descendants, as though it were a ghost. Entangled with this spectral presence is the family secret that has never been mentioned or properly addressed. Unlike the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s spectre, which hovers between life and death, presence and absence, and causes established certainties to vacillate, the ghost haunting these narrators is more akin to the notion of the phantom described by psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in their exploration of transgenerational trauma and family secrets. They argue that undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants, even if, and especially when, they know nothing about their distant causes. Read the full response ︎

 
GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Qinghan Chen is a graduate student in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She enjoys hiking, writing, and slow cinema.

BUT WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM? 
MISHA ZAKHAROV RESPONDS TO ALISA BERGER’S THREE BORDERS

As part of my ongoing, on-again, off-again personal inquiry into the filmic representations of Koryo-saram culture, I have gathered many examples of under-seen cinematic and moving image works. Below is my list, shared in response to Alisa Berger’s film, with the hope that these stories will be disseminated further:

• Kolkhoz Avant-Garde (1946);
• Ariran Ensemble (1973);
• Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle (1988);
• Yermek Shinarbayev’s Revenge (1989);
• Lavrenti Song’s Koryo-saram (1993);
• Vadim Pak’s Deportation (1997);
• Y. David Chung’s and Matt Dibble’s Koryo Saram: The Unreliable People (2007);
• Kim Soyoung’s Exile Trilogy: Heart of Snow, Heart of Blood (2014), Sound of Nomad: Koryo Arirang (2017), and Goodbye My Love, NK (2019).

Read the full response here (link forthcoming). 

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Misha Zakharov is a russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent (he/they), a political immigrant, and a London-based author and film worker. He is currently completing a practice-based PhD project in Film & TV Studies at the University of Warwick, as part of which he curates Screening Rights, West Midlands’ festival of socially engaged and formally innovative cinema, and researches film festivals as sites of (un)learning and solidarity.