IN YOUR SHOES
FLORENCE LAM, CHAN Tze Woon
Hong Kong｜2024｜ Doc｜ Color + BW｜30 min｜ Cantonese
Performance artist Florence and documentary filmmaker Tze-woon are lovers. They propose to exchange one memory from before they met and attempt to reenact each other’s experience with their own artistic language. Distinctive gender ordeals and social roles are fundamentally incomprehensible for both. As a man, how would Tze-woon ever understand the creativity and destructivity of female fertility? In the other hand, how would Florence interpret the complex transformation of Tze-woon's emotional relation with his position as he endured the Hong Kong political unrest? Could they really take one step closer towards each other through the process?
Director
CHAN Tze-Woon
Chan Tze Woon is a Hong Kong-based director and writer. His debut feature-length documentary “Yellowing” (2016) won the “Shinsuke Ogawa Prize” at the 2017 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Chan’s second feature film “Blue Island” (2022), a hybrid film that blends together documentary and memory reenactment, taking the audience on a journey through Hong Kong's past and present, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has won the “Best International Documentary” at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Chan has been experimenting with and creating images that blur the boundary between reality and fiction. His past works have been presented at the London Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, New Director/ New Film Festival, and Zurich Film Festival
Florence LAM
Florence Lam (b.1992 Vancouver, Canada) is currently based in Hong Kong. Lam works with wonder and magical thinking, to fuse together current moral issues with child-like world viewswith performance art as the main medium of expression. She obtained her MA Fine Art from Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2017 and her BA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2014.Lam has performed around Asia and Europe, including Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022), Para Site (Hong Kong, 2021), Nanhai Gallery (Taipei, Taiwan 2019), Manifesta 11 (Zürich, Switzerland 2016) etc. Art festivals include Black Market International - Exploring 2021(Frankfurt, Germany 2021), ZABIH Performance Festival (Lviv, Ukraine 2019) etc. She worked as a re-performer for “The Cleaner” Retrospective of Marina Abramović at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2018). She is the co-founder and co-curator of Per.Platform, Hong Kong-based live art platform founded in 2021.
11.14 ㊃ 12:00〡台南新光影城 4 廳〡★ Q&A session with the Director
11.17 ㊐ 15:00〡台南新光影城 4 廳〡★ Q&A session with the Director
同場放映：《15》《爺爺來訪的夜》《我是猫》
Florence LAM: Putting on his tattered shoes, even if it’s ill-fitting on me. I tried to feel the shape of his feet imprinted on the sole, but I can’t feel his body heat anymore. I rubbed to warm it up, to reenact that feeling after running. I lifted the shoes up easily, despite it looking big and heavy, until I found him squatting down supporting its weight with his hands. No matter how real the moment I re-perform his memory, I can never really replicate the danger he faced and the fear he endured at the time.
However, I seemed to understand something when I tried to learn his creative language. Holding the worn-out shoes that we were reluctant to throw away, we embrace them with care.
CHAN Tze-woon: “As a man, how would you ever understand the unique experience of a female body?” Indeed, body and sexuality are fundamentally incomprehensible, so is creative expression. Florence and I hold a completely different view towards the truth, could we walk into each other’s memory through our own creative media? Despite being sceptical, at least we stepped into each other’s shoes and tried to take one step forward.
TW：「你作為男性，怎可能了解女性身體獨特的經歷？」性別與身體，似是一個難以跨越的鴻溝，創作亦然，我倆對於真實的看法迥然不同，我們能否透過各自的媒介，走進對方記憶裡的世界？縱使有點懷疑，但起碼我們穿上對方的鞋子走前了一步。
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