Jue Yang
There is no Death in Gravity 2020
The waves of life in 2020 — shift to a home studio, loss of social life, death of a family member and, how incredibly the universe works, falling in love — resulted in a gradual fraying of the filmmaker's energy to finish the films she had proposed as graduation works. In her attempts to carve certainty, the filmmaker made this moving image. At last, she could arrange and rearrange the timeline, and find solace in a universe (full of people).
Jue Yang is a writer, filmmaker and critic. In her current writings, she explores institutional oppression and generational trauma with empathy and criticality. Her images come from looking and listening deeply, and express the longing for sovereignty and the care-taking of home. Both her writing and filmmaking practices involve annotating and archiving.
There is no Death in Gravity
"I used sound footage from freesound.org, visual footage from another film, which I have not been able to finish due to the pandemic, and animated archive footage of the merging of two black holes. I whisper throughout the film, contemplating the poetic connection between the mundane and the cosmic through the sound of my upstairs neighbor's footsteps... During the editing process, I experienced grief of losing a family member who lived in a different country. The usage of sound footage from strangers — acquired from the amorphous internet — became my way of connecting with the world when physical travel and means to produce were limited."