These are the winners of the Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS) which took place from July 14 – 21, 2022.

Best EXiS Award

Inspired by the diary of a migrant worker, the documentary weaves several social and artistic threads together: the life a Thai migrant sex worker named Ploy who works in Singapore’s “jungle brothel”; the narratives of other migrant workers; an exploration of Singaporean forests and public parks; and the process through which the artist-filmmaker delves into and revisits Ploy’s experience. Ploy is a character as well as a collage of several visual forms, including painting, photography, photo-roman (photo-novel), 35mm slide projection, letters, and a herbarium. The film reconstructs the journey of Ploy through an array of visual media. (EXiS 2022)

Trailer:

Korean EXiS Award

The work(ing device) that resembles a clock does not allow the fixed time to be fixed, in order to perceive the actual time sense. It is not a sort of clock that assumes and measures the absolute time, but the image itself which arises from the power operating under the film and the relationship with the power. The image, which is the reality itself, cannot be divided by a membrane of celluloid. Which exists as being real oscillates between the area of the virtual and the realm under the physically acting film. (EXiS 2022)

JungWoon Award

Land Mark is based on my research of a geospatial information company. The scenes taken in the company reveal elaborate process of how aerial photographs transform into geometrical figures as well as mathematical values. Those scenes interestingly unveil the paradox of image: they show the making process of a map as a set of images, but also the fact that modeling reality requires abstracting reality. In Land Mark, computer generated image involving such a paradox of image is compared, contrasted and connected with moving image. In the history of film, ‘like reality’ has been interpreted as a synonym of ‘preservation of reality’. To perceive image ‘like reality’ today, however, we need rather specific technical conditions producing the world with a set of data and associated operations. To sense our reality, so to speak, all we need is those conditions and our unconditional belief on them. (EXiS 2022)

Jury Special Mention

“Constant” is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. “Constant” asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions. (EXiS 2022)

Trailer: