Jade, a Korean-born art student, writes in her diary about encountering anti-Asian racism, sexism, and homophobia in France. The work moves through screen recording, found footage, and 3D animation, keeping close to the unstable surface where private anger becomes a public image.
Her disillusionment with France, her rage at racists, and the lack of understanding from others all push her to reconcile with reality through art. Instead of treating art as a solution, the film follows it as a fragile procedure for surviving humiliation, misrecognition, and everyday violence.
Process notes
The production was deliberately staged like a traditional film shoot inside Jade’s home, with lights and cameras present, but those tools become decorative witnesses rather than the real capture device. The “real shooting” was made through a mobile-phone 3D scan of Jade and the room, later reconstructed as fragmented 3D material. The flash and shutter sounds turn the scan into a mechanical gaze, connecting image capture with the violence described in Jade’s diary. The resulting screen is filled with missing surfaces, torn room fragments, papers, furniture, and half-registered bodies; those broken details make the room both a psychological portrait of being foreign and a taunt aimed at the privilege of looking. The project was produced within the REACTAsie research-action context on discrimination and racism experienced by people of East and Southeast Asian origin in France.
Festivals / screenings
- 2024, Nowness Short Film Award China Wave, Shanghai, China
- 2023, Un Festival C’est Trop Court, Nice, France
- 2023, Nowness Short Film Award, Shanghai, China — Best Creative Award
- 2023, KUANDU Film Festival, Taipei, Taiwan
- 2023, Dunhuang Animation Festival, Dunhuang, China
- 2023, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Beijing, China
Exhibitions
- 2024, I and You, Outside Art Space, Beijing, China
- 2024, Create Dangerously: Faces of Contemporary Chinese Artists, Ambiguity Film, London, United Kingdom
- 2023, N/A Non attribué, la galerie de l’EE-A, Paris, France
Links / references
- BISFF official selection: Sitting on My Face Official Beijing International Short Film Festival page.
- BISFF 2023 Q&A / 映后现场实录 BISFF discussion record on meta-animation, 3D scanning, hunting and science fiction.
- NOWNESS Short Film Award China Wave / The Paper Award announcement carrying the Best Creative Award record.
- NOWNESS Talent Program interview / The Paper Interview around the fifth NOWNESS Talent Program.
- Un Festival C’est Trop Court 2023 catalogue Official Nice festival catalogue.