Pauses, Mumbles, Whispers, Silences
Pauses, Mumbles, Whispers, Silences
Poetry Reading + Film Screening
A Gaza Community Fundraiser
November 2, 2025, 6:00pm
This fundraising event will donate all proceeds to Gaza Soup Kitchen, and Mahmoud Alabsi and his family as part of the Monthly Mutual Aid for Gaza program. In addition to performances, we’ll have postcards, poetry chapbooks and zines for sale.
Pauses, Mumbles, Whispers, Silences convenes a series of experimental shorts that probe the negative space of language—the blockages, frictions, attenuations, and erasures that arise in the act of enunciation. These interruptions reflect broader structures: political instability, geopolitical entanglement, cross-cultural mediation, kinship, and postcolonial trauma. Through subversive visual strategies and speculative perspectives, the works attempt to trace, disclose, and counteract linguistic absence.
In addition, four writers come together to interrogate the limits of language and the consequences of silence. In what ways does the poet’s gaze fail, and how can we continue to insist on our witnessing in spite of these failures?
Here, language becomes both subject and method: its instrumental function is suspended, opening instead toward resistant forms of articulation and a redefinition of linguistic boundaries amid ambiguity and indeterminacy.
Participating artists include Yan Wai Yin, Onyou Oh, Tenzin Phuntsog, Udval Altangerel, Sky Hopinka, Shen Xin, and Eva Giolo, with readings by Maria Gray, Jenevieve Ting, basalt hsu, and bella blue.
Screening Program:
Total Run Time: 115 minutes
Muted Bridges
Yan Wai Yin
16mm transferred to digital, 3:35, 2023
Muted Bridges records five oddly refurbished bridges in the Hong Kong Island which were once heavily covered with slogans, signs and information during the social unrest. It is a direct respond to my previous work Tugging Diary, where everything are renewed, erased, as if there’s a new page awaiting.
Too Long Ago, Not Far
Yan Wai Yin
Super8 transferred to digital, 13:07, 2024
When I first took up this Super 8 camera, I knew I was about to leave my home. Too Long Ago, Not Far, shot between 2019 to 2023, alludes to the Huaying Tongyu [華英通語, meaning: interchangeable expressions between Chinese and English, first published in 1867 in New York], the earliest English textbook for Chinese people that uses Cantonese phonetic notation to teach the pronunciation of English words. This seamless editing mode offers me the base to record everything in the city as notations, things that I want to look at over and over again. Perhaps by the time I go back, nothing changes, everything remains the same. As the Chinese saying goes, horses keep on running, and people keep on dancing.
A Tongue Called Mother
Eva Giolo
16mm transferred to digital, 18:18, 2019
A Tongue Called Mother depicts the relationship between language, gestures and affiliation. It slowly captures the actions and words of three generations of women in the same family and children learning to read, meditating on words learnt and forgotten through the body.
Grounds of Coherence #1, but this is the language we met in
Shen Xin16mm and DV transferred to digital, 12:16, 2023
Protests in regional Mandarin, words for a story in Arabic, and a couple telling myth felt in English, three languages map their movements through relations. What is heard, and what is then given meaning in these connectedness of migratory and loving nature, is paired to forms, and transmitted through possible sounds.
Whispers in the Water
Onyou Oh
16mm transferred to digital, 8:59, 2020
A woman who talks with dead people explores different dimensions of language through her memories that involve whispers and water. She learns, unlearns, and relearns how to speak. At the end of her journey, she encounters an existence whose voice resembles hers and sees how a language emerges from her breath.
Mother Tongue
Tenzin Phuntsog
35mm transferred to digital, 6:52, 2023
Young children recite the Tibetan alphabet, folk songs, body parts and world building in a simple yet defiant act of speaking in one's own mother tongue against erasure and assimilation. Filmed in and around abandoned military bunkers along a coastline overgrown with vegetation.
The Wind Carries Us Home
Udval Altangerel
Digital, 11:19, 2022
Through rituals of birth and death, the filmmaker and her family reconnect with their ancestral land in the Gobi Desert.
Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths
Eva Giolo
16mm transferred to digital, 24:08, 2024
In Eva Giolo’s latest work the resonances of place, magic and myth unfold through play. Attendant to the landscape through a child’s-eye, the film streams into the specific, hidden, and vast geologies of the Dolomite mountains, through the trills and murmurs of Ladin, the minority Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in the region. As the children narrate local folklore, this language and its oral traditions, passed from body to body, itself becomes corporeal and indivisible from the land. (Open City Documentary Film Festival)
Kicking the Clouds
Sky Hopinka
16mm transferred to digital, 15:37, 2021
This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.