Because of technical difficulties, the film started about 20 minutes later than planned.
The first film, OVERSEAS by Wichanon Somumjarn & Anocha Suwichakornpong, follows WawaKai, a Burmese immigrant worker who grades squid and dumps the undesirable ones. In this film, there is an abundance of the use of the tracking technique. The camera follows WawaKai from behind as she walks to a seafood factory. It's as if the person watching her was a ghost who couldn't do anything about her sadness, but could only watch her from behind to see if she's alright. While she is changing into work clothes, she talks to her friend about a television series they have been watching and comments on how she's glad the two leads are finally married. I found that scene intriguing because it shows that even though WawaKai is living a very simple and modest lifestyle, she is able to step into a fantasy world of luxury and love by watching television. On her way to and in the police station, I notice close-up shots used more often and could see seriousness in the characters' faces. Later on, we find out that she WawaKai was raped and demands an abortion. I feel that her management of undesirable squid is very similar to abortion, in that she wants to get rid of the baby because it is undesirable waste to her.
Another film that portrayed human's waste management was New Work From Directors by Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Lee, & Ernst Karel. In the beginning of the film all i saw were what looked like metallic confetti flying around. Then, the director used rack focus and focused on what was behind the confetti: a lot of garbage- and I figured out that the confetti was bits and scraps of metal, paper, and plastic from the garbage. Because garbage-sorting machines work very quickly and sloppily, Ernst and Pawel not only used a slower frame rate but even used 4 channels of audio at 96 kHz played back at 48 kH to capture reality and play it back in slow motion. The directors used long shots to capture the immense pile of clothes, cans, boxes, food, bags, and other waste that Americans normally dump every day. They also started out with a shot of a worker in a garbage picker-upper truck and zoomed out of that shot to compare the size to the piles of garbage for the audience to see.
Notes From the Panel:
Dana Levy on The Last Supper:
"The absence of humans makes it more visual... You perceive the color and shape of the objects more... had to rush to next shot, expecting shot, dark room, force to sit for an hour... I like the challenge of evoking drama without the presence of humans, but instead with animals, architecture, and nature."
Pawel Wojtasik & Ernst Karel on New Work From Directors:
"Apocolyptic... Buddhism: buddha on lotus, on mud, smelly, disgusting, decaying, potent... life is ending, but something new is beginning... human failing of being able to recycle our things... we spend millions making machines and fixing machines, human staff necessary, scale of how much stuff, effort in sorting it out, reality of our greed, recycling is positive because of overwhelming amount of garbage that we have fogotten about, documentary shows afterlife of garbage in trash can... useful to refuse = burden nature+ manmade very powerful, can take over, alot about failure... Recycled cubes sent to India and China, energy wasted, but recycle aluminum is efficient, plastic is not...things happening so fast, need to slow down."
Pawel Wojtasik on Pigs:
"Farmers take casino leftovers and feed it to the pigs...free food...pigs went wild over outdated milk...Greed that exists in nature: pigs."
Here's a creepy selfie I took with Colleen after the panel discussion.
It looks like we're wearing the mask from Phantom of the Opera.
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