THE FORGOTTEN SPACE
Dirs. Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, 2010.
Austria, Netherlands, United States, China, Spain. 112 min.
In English, Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Indonesian, and Chinese with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, JULY 5 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 11 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 23 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 28 – 7:30 PM

“Those of us who travel by air, or who ‘go surfing’ on the Web, scarcely think of the sea as a space of transport any more. We live instead in the age of cyberspace, of instantaneous electronic contact between everywhere and everywhere else. In this fantasy world the very concept of distance is abolished. More than 90% of the world’s cargo moves by sea, and yet educated people in the developed world believe that material goods travel as they do, by air, and that money, traveling in the blink of an eye, is the abstract source of all wealth.” –Allan Sekula

Taking the sea itself as the titular forgotten space that globalization exploits to connect industrial production and distribution, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s humanizing investigation into the subject illuminates places and livelihoods simultaneously linked and contained from one another. These landscapes concern the changing worlds of Indonesian and South Korean seafarers, Dutch villagers, homeless encampment and truck drivers in Los Angeles, young Chinese factory workers, and more whose experiences intersect with the transport of ISO shipping containers. As Sekula’s sharp Marxist commentary contends, the standardization, flow, and interdependence that these metal boxes have wrought is a recipe for ruination. While despairing in these insights, the filmmakers’ deft mixing of archival footage, interviews, and stunning cinematography find frequent patches of humor, warmth, and even hope.

Preceded by

SEA – SHIPPING – SUN
Dirs. Tiffany Sia and Yuri Pattison, 2021.
Hong Kong, United Kingdom. 11 min.

Filmed over the course of 18 months from 2019 to the onset of the pandemic-era global supply chain crisis in 2021, SEA – SHIPPING – SUN is a lulling portrait of the sea shot in a period of dramatic geopolitical shifts. Set to archival recordings of BBC 4 shipping forecasts, the camera observes container ships along the coast of Hong Kong from the vantage point of ferries as they move in and out of frame, from sunrise to sunset.

The daily UK shipping forecast has a beloved reputation for inducing sleep and relaxation due its calm, repetitive vocal delivery of name places and weather patterns meant to keep seafarers informed. The recordings selected for the film remain soothing as ever while marking turning points in global politics: the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016 and the passing of Chris Patten’s Hong Kong electoral reform bill on June 30, 1994. In 2020, June 30 was both the deadline for EU citizens to apply to live in the United Kingdom and when the Hong Kong national security law passed, following the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests. However stable and nostalgic the shipping forecast is as a cultural fixture, international commerce is anything but.