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Natalie Khoo

0:20:43

Singapore

English, Chinese Dialect

A Spider, Fever and Other Disappearing Islands

蜘蛛、发烧和其他消失的岛屿


2021
Chinese Mainland Premiere

In Chinese folklore, the spider spirit is a shape-shifting femme fatale who lures men into a web of deception causing death. Rather than reckoning with the spirit spirit as a stable narrative, A Spider, Fever and Other Disappearing Islands is an experimental documentary that borrows and subverts these mythologies through a return to the spider spirit’s oral historical roots in my grandmother’s memoirs. Tracing the colonial period to the present-day, my grandmother’s migration between the Indonesian Riau Islands and Singapore becomes entangled with a spider spirit’s migratory route. Together, they construct a psychogeography of loss between two Southeast Asian islands, where stories of colonial ghosts, memories of sisterhood, and tales of disappearance are woven together through a melange of media forms: iPhone footage, confessional interviews, surreal dream re-enactments, animation, drawings and ethnography.

在中国民间传说中,蜘蛛精是一种会幻化形态的女妖,引诱男人进入她所编织的一张致死的欺骗之网。影片并没有用一种固定的叙事来讲述蜘蛛精的传说,而是作为一部实验纪录片,通过回归“我”祖母口述的回忆录中关于蜘蛛精的历史根源,从中借用和颠覆了这些神话传说。从殖民时代追溯至今,我祖母在印度尼西亚廖内群岛和新加坡之间的辗转似乎与蜘蛛精的迁徙路线纠缠在了一起。他们的经历一起构建了两个东南亚岛屿之间失落的心灵地图,在这片土地上,殖民幽灵的故事、姐妹情谊的记忆和消失的传说:通过多种媒体形式交织在一起:iPhone镜头、有关忏悔的采访、超现实的梦境重演,动画、绘画和民族志。

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