CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA PRESENTS:
Making Kin(o)! Remote in New York : a letter to you was a slice of my reflection

A film program organized by Erica Sheu of Taiwan-based experimental film group/collective ReaRflex
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 27TH @ MONO NO AWARE : CINEMA ARTS NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION
33 FLATBUSH AVENUE, BROOKLYN NEW YORK - LIMITED ATTENDANCE TO 40 - MASKS AVAILABLE
DOORS 7PM – STARTS PROMPTLY AT 7:30PM – FREE OR $5 SUGGESTED DONATION

TRT, 67 minutes. Additional time for discussion / Q & A with Erica Sheu *IN PERSON *

PROGRAM:
Since 2021, Taiwan-based experimental film group/collective ReaRflex has been hosting a series of screenings titled, Making Kin(o)!, borrowing the phrase from Donna Haraway’s “making kin, but not babies.” Making Kin(o) focuses on artist-organized screening events, reflecting a grassroots spirit tracing its history back to the beginning of the avant-garde cinema community. ReaRflex also hosts visiting artists to present work when they visit Taiwan.
ReaRflex’s main members, Johan Chang, Erica Sheu, and Tzuan Wu, travel with film screening programs. Past engagements include Worm (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Center Kanuma (Tochigi, Japan), Tamagawa University (Tokyo, Japan), Whammy! Analog media (Los Angeles, USA), among others.
One of ReaRflex’s longest-running programs, 台日實驗電影自主放映, Taiwanese and Japanese Experimental Film Screenings, is an annual screening presented in collaboration with Ground Level/Rebel Cinema (GLC). GLC is a self-organized volunteer cohort from Image Forum Institute (Tokyo, Japan) that presents new work or work in progress. The screenings are hosted concurrently in Taipei and Tokyo, while filmmakers reunite in person and online from both venues. Many participants, whether working in a film-related job or elsewhere, use this opportunity to make their work more personal and reflective of the films they aspire to make.

’The films featured in this program are from the Taiwan side of this collaborative screening series. They reveal a personal ritual, a letter to a newborn, exchanged film diaries, and fresh and curious eyes behind a film camera. Shot on film and hand-processed, they are tactile approaches to personal whispers, or a happy spinning around.’ - Erica Sheu

|morphosis, Lichun TSENG
16mm to digital | b&w and color | digital sound | 15 min | 2025 | Netherlands, Taiwan
collaborated with Mick O’Shea   

A journey in flux—shifting between memory and reality, between past and present—where sound and image move sometimes in parallel, sometimes in cohesion: independent, yet interlaced.
Change unfolds within the process of creation—between us, in us, within this piece—in the continuous, transforming line of morphosis: across time, through time.

Sites of Dependency, YEN Wang-Yun
16mm to digital | color | digital sound | 6 min | 2025 | Netherlands, Taiwan

Gregory Bateson's notion of ecology brings together incomparable forces of diverse origins and directions. The environment and the mind are entities that continually shape one another. On an artificial island built for migratory birds and water circulation, all I can do is relearn the world while being as serious as possible about the activities in my mind. With multiple layers of images, I find myself thinking of a human child to be born.

Single 8 Single Frame Diary, Chun-tien CHEN
8mm to digital | color | digital sound | 8 min | 2025 | Taiwan

I tossed my days into a Fujica Z450 with a busted focus, shooting on forty-year-old expired Single 8 film. One frame, maybe two, at a time—nothing stayed under control, nothing could be trusted. Friends’ faces, the backs of family, a corner of the city, the countryside wind, highways rushing by—they all fracture, leap, flicker across the strips of film. And with messy processing, the colors go wild—yellow, purple, blue—or vanish completely, like memory itself slipping away.

Fur Film Vol. 1: I don’t own a cat, Tzuan WU & Erica SHEU
16mm & super 8 to digital | b/w & color | digital sound | 7 min | 2021 | Taiwan, USA

The cat I don't own runs through windows between different spaces and times, and it disappears before finishing a sentence.
This film project started with a roll of camera test in black & white, then added in both filmmakers’ outtakes and rushes (the literal translation of "fur film" in Mandarin). Sheu and Wu collaborate to experiment with alternative audio-visual editing workflows, seeking to reclaim the sensory qualities embedded in images formed through their early experiences with celluloid film formats.
This film is the first volume of an ongoing exchange diary project. Fur Films vol.2: mirror mirror was joined by Johan CHANG and has remained as a work in progress since 2022, despite being exhibited and screened publicly internationally.

Jouhatsu Letters, Johan CHANG & Masa KUDO
16mm & super 8 to digital | b&w and color | digital sound | 31 min | 2024 | Taiwan, Japan

A back-and-forth correspondence between two filmmakers in Tokyo and Taipei. These video letters began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was difficult to meet, and continued until 2024. Each reply must quote a sound or image from the previous letter.

Total running time for the PROGRAM: 67 minutes

Bio
徐璐 Erica Sheu is a Los Angeles-based Taiwanese artist who makes experimental short films exploring synesthetic properties of memory and alternative analog filmmaking techniques. 
Sheu had taught personal filmmaking workshops at the Academy Museum, and celluloid film workshops at Mono No Aware, T.A.P.E Los Angeles (housed at Whammy! Analog Media), CalArts, among other organizations. She hosts micro-cinema screenings at grassroots venues independently and with her collective, ReaRflex.
Her films have shown at Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, among others. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts.

Additional biographies:

Lichun TSENG is a Taiwanese artist based in the Netherlands. In her works, she is dedicated to exploring the vital dimensions of life, absorbing and partaking in its wholeness. Observation and reflective contemplation are profound mental drives in her work. She seeks to capture the indescribable yet sensible state of invisible in-betweenness through light-sensitive film. She approaches her research and practice mainly with 16mm film, installation, and audiovisual performance.
The characteristics of 16mm analog film allow her to explore liminal spaces and the shifts between light, time, and space. Her artistic practice is connected with her meditative practices. She is a member of Filmwerkplaats, an artist-run film lab in Rotterdam.

YEN Wang-Yun is an artist and filmmaker from Taiwan. With a background in literature, documentary filmmaking and image theory, he started a cycle of works that explore the energy of sound and image in both personal and collective memories of death. He is a member of Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam, learning the ethos of an artist-run film lab. Meanwhile, he is doing a PhD research on museum-related moving image exhibitions at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

Chun-Tien CHEN (b. 1989) graduated in documentary filmmaking from Tainan National University of the Arts. Chen makes documentary, animated and experimental films with his topics being, most frequently, architecture and changes in urban environments. In 2021, he premiered his fiction feature debut, A Long Goodbye to the Origin.

Tzu-An WU works between experimental film and its expansions. He makes collages with analogue films, through mixing heterogeneous images, audio, and texts, he attempts to inquire about the relationship between narratives and the selves.
He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, New York, and a BA in Gender and Cultural Studies from NTHU, Taiwan. His works are presented in the forms of screenings, exhibitions, and expanded cinema performances, and have been shown internationally, including BFI Flare (London), IFFR (Netherland), CROSSROADS (San Francisco), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Golden Horse Film Festival (Taiwan), TIDF(Taiwan), Taipei Art Awards, Taiwan Biennial, Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Manila and more.
He also programs experimental films, and has been a member of the experimental filmmaker group “ReaRflex” and Bak-Nih Audiovisual Lab.

Johan CHANG began creating personal projects through courses at Image Forum in Tokyo, after many years of working in documentary film festivals/organizations and producing documentaries. Her work explores the expressive potential of moving images to address memory, image-making, handmade processes, and diary films.
Born in 1993 in Hokkaido, Japan, Masa KUDO’s work has screened at the Image Forum Festival East Asian Experimental Competition, GLAS Animation Festival international competition, Zagreb International Animation Film Festival, and more.

ReaRflex後照鏡 @rearflexpfilm

MONO NO AWARE SCREENING SERIES:
The CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA series will present the work of artists, film-makers and curators who are traveling or presenting special interactive programs in-person. Our hope is to engage the community by showing work with a focus on post-screening discussion. This series is made possible by support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).