An outdoor film programme highlighting the artistic, playful, and expressive form of short and medium length films.
Platform, Objectifs
28 Jun 2025 | Music Memorabilia Swap: 5pm – 9pm / Screening: 7.30pm – 9.30pm
Curated by Sonali Joshi
Screening Rating: PG13
Entry by donation at the door, minimum donation: $10 – $15. Please RSVP here.
Music Memorabilia Swap | 5pm – 9pm, free admission. Limited slots available, please register here to swap.
Swing by from 5pm on the same day as Now Showing: Meet Me In Song for a swap session full of music memories! Got a record you’re ready to pass on? Old magazines or band merchandise someone else would love? Bring your pre-loved music treasures and trade stories (and stuff) with fellow fans. Give your items a second life—and maybe find a gem of your own!
Note: Interested participants for the Music Memorabilia Swap can register here, limited slots are available.
Participants also have the option to sell their items in the event that a swap exchange does not work out.
Now Showing: Meet Me in Song Film Screening | 7.30pm – 9pm
Curated by Sonali Joshi
Music and film are playmates, companions, they go hand in hand. Film leans on music in more ways than one; the mood, the tone, the atmosphere within a film so often shaped by music. Indeed, music has often led the way for film and it can lift film. In her director’s statement, Viv Li (Across the Water), one of the filmmakers featured in this programme, talks of how Wong Kar-wai once described music as being the ‘truest’ form of art.
This programme of short films explores music as an intrinsic element to film, where it plays a key role rather than merely a theme, where music takes us to another place – pointing to memory, contemplation, fleeting moments of the everyday, passing encounters.
Each of the films in this programme is punctuated by music in ways that create sensorial and experiential moments that often draw upon memories that encapsulate a sense of nostalgia – through analogue, vinyl, radio, hip-hop, rap, blues, ballads, as well as classical music.
In Across the Waters, a Taiwanese ballad sung by Teresa Teng plays as a teenage girl and mysterious truck driver share a brief moment of connection in a film that explores notions of freedom and belonging.
In Stay Awake, Be Ready, everyday moments at street food stalls and drinking spots are captured in which a conversation between three young men is disrupted by a motorbike accident. The film begins with a Vietnamese guitar-based song which plays as life unfolds on a street corner. A complete shift in tone then occurs as we vicariously listen to Ave Maria coming through the headphones of one of the young men.
Fingers flicking over vinyl create their own rhythm in a record store in Japan at the start of Tune. Inspired by the documentary Desperate Man Blues about musician and record collector Joe Bussard, the film plays out to the tune of Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson, as nostalgic images of the sea and a road trip flicker past.
The opening scene of New Land Broken Road introduces us to three young hip-hop dancers with a burst of Cambodian rap music. This tone later shifts to more traditional Cambodian pop music with a playful dance routine in the same hip-hop vein, representing the hopes and dreams of youth alongside a sense of displacement, all against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape.
The final film in this programme represents something of a metamorphosis in which Thai noise musician Thom Assajan-Jakgawan (known as Thom AJ Madson) confines himself to a small room as experiments in sound and meditation play out.
Within this programme there is a distinctly playful tone where music and sound are often prioritised over dialogue, where nostalgia and memory collide, whilst also pointing to a sometimes disconcerting present or an unknown future.
A portrait of a nomadic musician Thom Assajan-Jakgawan. In the film, he appears as a fictionalised version of himself living in a fragile state, a collapsed country. He solitarily confines himself in an unoccupied room, continuing the meditative rhythms of his tunes.
‘mare lu ze=i’ is not a real word. He accidentally heard it from the repetitive layers of the loop of his sounds. It slips out of nowhere. It makes its own sound, in his head, which he then utters, as a mantra for protection, which transports him into a meditative trance before the working of his sounds. This is all part of his project, Sap (bewitched).
About the filmmakers
Viv Li is a Chinese filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. Born and raised in Beijing, Viv spent the last fourteen years traveling and living in various cities in Europe, South America and Southeast Asia. This grants her a distinct point of view as a well-travelled Chinese artist. Her latest short film ACROSS THE WATERS, celebrated its world premiere at 77th Cannes Film Festival’s Official Competition and won the Lights on Women’s Worth Award, presented by Elle Fanning. The film is also purchased by ARTE. Her first short film, I DON’T FEEL AT HOME ANYWHERE ANYMORE, received a Special Mention at IDFA in 2020, the world’s largest documentary film festival, and was screened at more than 70 festivals around the world, gathering 8 international awards. The film is licensed by multiple streaming platforms such as Tënk, Argo and Cathy Play.
Pham Thien An is a film director, producer and screenwriter, born in November 1989 (Lam Dong Province, Vietnam). After four years of undergraduate studies in Information Technology at Lotus University, Ho Chi Minh City, he realized his interest in cinematography and filmmaking. In recent years, he has won several film awards in Vietnam. In 2015, he moved to Houston, Texas (USA) and continued working as a freelance filmmaker. His short film The Mute (2018) has travelled across several film festivals (Winterthur, Palm Springs, Uppsala, Encounters). His latest short Stay Awake, Be Ready, official selection at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs 2019, was produced with the support of CJ Short Film Making Project. His first feature film Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell was the 2023 Camera d’Or Winner at Cannes Film Festival.
Kaori Oda is a filmmaker and artist. In 2016, she completed a Doctor of Liberal Arts in filmmaking in Sarajevo, supervised by Béla Tarr. Aragane (2015), shot in a Bosnian coal mine, premiered at Yamagata International Film Festival. Toward a Common Tenderness (2017) had its world premiere at DOK Leipzig and TS’ONOT / Cenote (2019), shot in underwater caves in Yucatán, premiered in Rotterdam. GAMA (2023) screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight and Cinéma du Réel. Oda received the Nagisa Oshima Prize in 2020 and the New Face Award of the Japanese Education Minister in 2021. Her latest film, Underground, was screened at Berlinale Forum 2025.
Kavich Neang (b. 1987) studied music and dance at a young age before graduating in professional design in 2013. In 2010, he directed his first short film, A Scale Boy, as part of a documentary film workshop led by Khmer-French filmmaker Rithy Panh, who also produced his 2013 mid-length documentary film Where I Go. In 2014, he co-founded the independent production company Anti-Archive along with Davy Chou, Steve Chen, and Park Sungho. In 2015, he directed his first two short fictions, Three Wheels, which premiered at Busan, and Goodbye Phnom Penh. A third short fiction, New Land Broken Road, premiered at the 2018 Singapore International Film Festival. Kavich Neang has also joined Busan’s Asian Film Academy, Locarno’s Summer Academy, Talents Tokyo, Docs by
the Sea, Luang Prabang Talent Lab, and Cannes Cinéfondation’s Résidence. He has recently participated in panel discussions on memory and cinema in Chiang Mai, Singapore, and Glasgow. He is recently shot his first narrative feature, Building, and his 2019 documentary, Last Night I Saw You Smiling, won the NETPAC Award at IFFR following its world premiere and the Special Jury Prize at Jeonju IFF.
PATHOMPON MONT TESPRATEEP was born in Bangkok but raised in Isan (the northeastern region of Thailand). He graduated with a Master degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London. Since 2014, Mont has been working on series of hand-processed 16mm and S-8 films: Endless, Nameless (2014), Song X (2017) and Confusion Is Next (2018), Pleng-Krom-Dek (Lullaby) (2019), Fatimah & Kulit (2019). His films have been shown at film festivals, including Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Media City Film Festival, etc., and exhibitions including “Multiple Planes”, BACC, “Biennale Jogja XV”, “Migration-Speaking Nearby” at ACC, Gwangju, “A Higher Calling”, White Space Beijing, etc. Mont has also been developing a script for his first feature film project.
Curator’s Bio
Sonali Joshi is a moving image curator, writer and film access specialist based in Tokyo. She is Founder & Director of Day for Night (UK) and Not That Films (Japan) working across curatorial projects, distribution and subtitling.
As a curator and writer, Sonali has particular interests in the relationship between cinema and architecture, the intersection between sound, image and text on screen, small national film industries and filmmaking collectives, and cultural activism. More broadly, Sonali’s curatorial practice seeks to expand access to independent cinema and artists’ film, particularly underrepresented and under-acknowledged areas of moving image culture.
Sonali has a PhD in Cinema Studies (University of Glasgow, UK). She previously worked in film programming at Cornerhouse (now HOME, Manchester, UK), film distribution in Paris and managed the translation-subtitling department of a London based post-production house. She has taught and mentored at National Film and Television School and London Film School among other UK universities, and has served on various festival juries including International Film Festival Rotterdam.