Vincent Grenier: In Focus

From 2008 to 2016, Bangkok-based filmmaker Sompot Chidgasornpongse, best known by his nickname “Boat,” rode every line of the Thai railway, capturing countless hours of footage of his encounters through the lens of his digital camera. Produced by his long-time friend and colleague Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Boat’s remarkable documentary Railway Sleepers depicts an unparalleled journey comprising elements that resemble the “real world” we live in—with its families, friends, food, chitchats, and hustles—but only exists amid the temporariness of the railroad; a fantastical world with a sense of nostalgia. Shot in a first-person point of view, the film starts as the train slowly leaves the station, establishing the inevitable reality of departure, of saying good-bye, that one faces before embarking on a journey to a new world. From school kids on a field trip to friends and young lovers, from foreigners in the nicer part of the train to the cramped section in the back, Boat’s inquisitive mind gently wonders and sparkles in the lights penetrating through the windows, the camera lens, and the dawn that breaks through the quiet darkness of the night. Railway Sleepers is an immersive field of fantasy where strangers relate, time stands still, and a sense of nostalgia subtly lingers.

Programmed and note by Hyesung ii.

This series, guest programmed by Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton, explores the history of India and its fragmentations through a series of experimental shorts from the nation. Kaushik and Batton write: 

In this program, we bring together a montage of experimental films from India that reckon with the history of this nation and its fragmentations. Three were produced by Films Division of India, the country’s vehicle for documentary and public information films, at a moment when state funds were directed toward more idiosyncratic and subversive experiments, exemplified by Pramod Pati's psychedelic collage Explorer (1968). In My Dreams (1975), by the feminist novelist Ismat Chughtai, the Urdu poetry of Ali Sardar Jafri inspires a meditation on the utopian aspirations of Nehruvian modernity on the cusp of its collapse into a period of authoritarianism, an event anticipated in Tyeb Mehta’s Koodal (1970). Referring to the Tamil word for “union” or “meeting point,” Koodal forms the core of our program as it brings together India’s past and present to reveal the dystopian violence beneath glossy hallucinations of progress. Ruchir Joshi’s Memories of Milk City (1991) reflects on the growing victimization of Muslims in Gujarat through a portrait of a city that has seen some of the worst communal violence in the nation’s history. We conclude the program with two films about memories under threat of disintegration: materially, as decaying, speckled, and ephemeral home movies in Ayisha Abraham’s You Are Here (2008), and as the recurring nightmares of filmmaker Mehdi Jahan’s aging mother—an Assamese Muslim woman contemplating the threat of erasure—in What would have been there, had there been nothing? (2023).

Programmed and note by Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton.

Total program runtime: Approx. 63 min.

Warning: this program contains sequences that may trigger seizures for visitors with photosensitive epilepsy.