English | Tiếng Việt

Saigon Experimental is delighted to invite you to ‘ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival)’, a screening programme curated by Feng-Mei Heiberer, who teaches cinema studies at New York University. She is author of ‘Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism’, and a programmer, most recently, with the Asian Film Festival Berlin and Dekoloniale/korientation e.V.

Part of a continuously growing body of work by diasporic artists globally, this film program shines light on artistic itineraries that exceed the spatial and temporal certainty most often associated with national identity and patriarchal lineage. What we witness are stunning explorations of the aesthetic possibilities of the moving image that give evidence to the creative capacity of diasporic home-making.

➤ Sarah Munaf – Journey Inside a City (Iraq/Turkey/Germany, 2022)
➤ Aykan Safoğlu – Hundsstern steigt ab (Dog Star Descending) (Germany, 2020)
➤ Sylvia Schedelbauer – 母の手紙 (Mother’s Letter) (Germany, 2025)
➤ Monica Vanesa Tedja – My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness (Indonesia, 2024)

We would like to thank Nathan Collis @nathanmcollis for poster design, Goethe-Institut @goetheinstitut_hochiminh for their kind support and A. Farm for hosting the event.

EVENT DETAILS
Please register via this link.
Date: Saturday, April 19
Time: 19:00 – 20:30
Location: Floor 6, Amanaki Hotel, 10 Nguyen Dang Giai, Thao Dien

Please park your vehicle at The Sentry (16 Nguyễn Đăng Giai)

ABOUT THE FILMS

Combining dashboard camera footage, social media posts, and phone recordings, Munaf sheds light on her precarious life as a female artist from Baghdad, Iraq. We follow the filmmaker’s journey from her attempts at creating contemporary art in a very limiting environment, the ISIS invasion, and her emigration to Turkey, to the invasion of Ukraine where her parents emigrated to.

Born in 1986, Sarah Munaf (she) graduated from the Baghdad College of Fine Arts in 2011, and completed an MA in sculpture in 2013. Munaf currently lives and works in Turkey. She was a member of the now-extinct art group Sada, which was founded to support Baghdadi artists.

Against the backdrop of Asia Minor’s colonial history, Safoğlu shares the story of his queer migration from Turkey to Germany. Scanning, shredding, and cropping images, the filmmaker develops a compelling response to the violence of repressed memory.

Born in Istanbul in 1984, Aykan Safoğlu (he) works in film, photography and performance. His hybrid artistic forms trace forgotten relationships across cultural, geographic, linguistic as well as temporal boundaries. He works and lives in Vienna and Berlin.

Schedelbauer discovers the rebellious story of her mother’s life as a young woman in conservative postwar Japan who eventually emigrates to Germany. Using found footage and the letter form, documentation becomes an act of shared defiance against patriarchal gender expectations as well as intergenerational memory-making.

Born in Tokyo in 1973, Sylvia Schedelbauer (she) moved to Berlin in 1993. Schedelbauer’s films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage.

During the three-year process of undergoing therapy, a filmmaker ponders the question of being fully accepted and loved by combing through archival film material from their two families: their biological, devout Christian, Indonesian family, and their chosen queer kin in Berlin.

Monica Vanesa Tedja (they) is a Jakarta-born Chinese-Indonesian filmmaker (*1991). Their films pose questions around minority identity and explore personal stories, in which the realm of memories, fantasy, and reality are blurred.