“A Land Imagined” and The Ghosts We Forget
about 63 months ago (02/21/2019)
"A Land Imagined" and The Ghosts We Forget | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo courtesy of Akanga Film Asia & Philipp Aldrup Photography Photo courtesy of Akanga Film Asia & Philipp Aldrup Photography February 21, 2019 By Alfonse Chiu (1200 words, six-minute read) The three definitions of the word “ghost” from the Oxford dictionary are as follows: the first, “an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living”; the second, “a slight trace or vestige of something”; and the third, “a faint secondary image caused by a fault in an optical system, duplicate signal transmission, etc.” In all three, presence is a suggestion of memory, amenable to corrections by means of a quick scrub of one’s spectacles. To become a ghost is to be remembered, to be shunned and feared, and to “haunt” the peripherals of those still living—the etymology of which stems from words meaning homes or dwellings—lurking like a partial recollection in the corner of wandering eyes. Ostensibly, a ghost is at the heart of A Land Imagined , the central conflict of which begins with a haunting: the sudden disappearance of Chinese migrant worker Wang (Emergency Stairs’ own artistic director, Liu Xiaoyi) from a land reclamation site draws the attention of investigator Lok (Peter Yu) who finds himself lost in a series of dreams and trances as he tries to retrace the steps that Wang took before he vanished.