Sine Screen Presents: ‘Whose Homeland’

Across two screening programmes, Whose Homeland considers migration, labour, and return as lived, embodied processes rather than fixed narratives. Together, the films foreground storytelling, memory, and autoethnography as counter-archival practices — ways of holding histories that exceed official records and national frameworks. Moving between collective imagination and intimate family histories, the programmes ask how ideas of homeland are continuously reshaped through displacement, labour, translation, and acts of remembering. The programmes are guest curated and will be introduced by Clare Chun-yu Liu.

Programme 1: ‘Whose Homeland: Migration, Labour and Storytelling’ (13:00–15:00)

Screening:
So Yo-hen, Taman Tamen, 2024 (100 mins)

This programme centres migrant experience as a form of living archive, foregrounding poetry, play, and collective storytelling as modes of resistance and care.

Set within Tainan Park — a long-standing gathering place for migrant workers in Taiwan — Taman Tamen (2024) unfolds through nocturnal encounters between two Indonesian poets who transform the residue of everyday labour into shared reverie. Blurring documentary and fiction, reality and illusion, the park emerges as a space of refuge and invisibility, intimacy and imagination.

Rather than fixing migrant lives within narratives of precarity, the film attends to how voices and bodies reanimate space through storytelling. Humour, role-play, and shifting perspectives disrupt linear narration, proposing imagination as a way to reclaim agency within conditions shaped by displacement.

The film continues Your Bros. Filmmaking Group’s long-term, community-rooted practice, which engages migrant labour through participatory processes and decentralised collaboration. Here, migration is not only documented but re-envisioned — as a site where memory, fantasy, and political reality intersect.

Programme 2: ‘Whose Homeland: Migration, Homecoming and Autoethnography’ (15:15–17:15)

This programme brings together three artist films that reflect on the act of “returning” — to ancestral villages, inherited histories, and imagined homelands — while questioning the possibility of belonging itself.

Through autobiographical and autoethnographic approaches, the films trace diasporic Chinese family histories shaped by migration across Southeast Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, Australia, and beyond. Each work examines how memory is constructed, mediated, and translated across generations, languages, and geographies.

Rather than offering resolution, these journeys expose the fractures embedded in ideas of origin and home. Collectively, the films position homecoming as an ongoing negotiation — shaped by distance, colonial histories, and the instability of images and testimony. By inhabiting uncertainty and multiplicity, the programme offers a counter-archive of diasporic experience grounded in subjectivity and lived experience.

Screenings:
Fiona Tan, May You Live in Interesting Times, 1997 (60 mins)

May You Live in Interesting Times (1997) is Fiona Tan’s most autobiographical work, tracing her family history through testimony and travel across Europe, Southeast Asia, and China. Moving between personal reflection and broader diasporic histories, the film examines how identity is shaped — and unsettled — by migration, inheritance, and distance from an ancestral homeland that remains ultimately uninhabitable.

Richard Fung, The Way to My Father’s Village, 1988 (38 mins)

I was born and grew up in Trinidad, on the other side of the world from China. In the fall of 1986 I finally went to my father's village in southern Guangdong. This experimental documentary examines the way that children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents. It is about the construction of history and memory, the experience of colonialism, and about Westerners looking at China. It is the first tape of a two-part series.

Erika Tan, Journeys of Remembrance, 2008 (18 mins)

Journeys of Remembrance (2008) revisits photographs taken during a family trip to an ancestral village in Fujian, China, treating images not as records but as sites of shifting interpretation. Through layered voiceovers and multilingual translation, the work exposes memory, authorship, and narration as unstable — shaped by time, language, and the act of re-reading itself.

About Whose Homeland (2025–26)
Whose Homeland is a film season presented by Sine Screen, running from November 2025 to March 2026 across London, with touring events in Bristol, Birmingham, and Manchester. The season explores migration, internal displacement, and marginalised lives, approaching homeland as a concept continually in flux.

With special events sited within diasporic communities—the season also anchors cinema within lived geographies of migration, where questions of homeland are continually reimagined. Presented with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding.

Advanced booking is required. Please select the programme(s) you wish to attend when booking.

Image credits:

1.So Yo-hen, 'Taman Tamen', 2024, 100 mins, film still. Courtesy of the artist.

2-3. Fiona Tan, 'May You Live in Interesting Times', 1997, 60 mins, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
4. Richard Fung, 'The Way to My Father’s Village', 1988, 38 mins, film still. Courtesy of the artist.
5-6.Erika Tan, 'Journeys of Remembrance', 2008, 18 mins, film still. Courtesy of the artist.

About esea contemporary

esea contemporary is the UK’s only non-profit art centre specialising in presenting and platforming artists and art practices that identify with and are informed by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) cultural backgrounds.

esea contemporary is situated in an award-winning building in the heart of Manchester, home to one of the largest East Asian populations in the UK. Since its inauguration as a community-oriented visual arts festival in 1986, esea contemporary has continuously evolved to establish itself as a dynamic and engaging space for cross-cultural exchanges in the British art scene, as well as in a global context.

esea contemporary aims to increase the visibility of contemporary art practices from the East and Southeast Asian communities and their diasporas. It is a site for forward-thinking art programmes that beyond exhibitions also include commissions, research, residencies, publishing, and a wide range of vibrant public events. esea contemporary values creativity, compassion, interconnectedness, and collectivity in implementing its mission.

Learn more at: www.eseacontemporary.org

Photo by Joe Smith.

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