In ‘Mental Landscape' Sai Kong Kham documents the turmoil in his home country of Myanmar. The short film recalls 4 days in his life and Myanmar's recent history that are of importance to the film maker. By combining abstract images, text and an intense sound design Sai Kong Kham provides the viewer with an experimental and highly personal film.
Mental Landscape is screening at Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival
The dates concerned are listed in the final segment and range from 2012 to 2021, In other words, roughly from the year Aung San Suu Kyi's party participated again in elections after her house arrest, until the year of the military coup. The third fragment i.e. is relatively easy to identify. We hear what could be gunfire or explosions, but it turns out to be the fireworks of a new year's celebration. When listening carefully, we can hear people wishing each other a Happy New Year or Mingalabar (Bless You). Sai Kong Kham draws from his memories regarding 1st of January 2013, the first time Myanmar celebrated the Western New Year. The other parts, however, are trickier. They are not shown in chronological order and on top of that they don't seem to relate to specific events, more to certain time periods such as the 2012 racial riots against the Rohingya Muslim community.
However, we can pose ourselves the question whether this identification is the main goal of the film. While it is true that with ‘Sweet Pie' and ‘This Land Is Our Land' Sai Kong Kham made more conventional documentaries. ‘Mental Landscape', in both concept and execution is clearly different. Rather than showing us an exact reliving or an objective view on events, he explores the functioning of memory, perception and consciousness. As is stated in the film, the director questions the way remembering and forgetting works.
To create the visuals, Sai Kong Kham uses long-exposure photography and stop-motion animation. The way he combines these techniques makes the images look like lines traced with light or crude line drawings. They are reminiscent of children's drawings, streetlights, or the recordings of a seismograph. The nature of these abstract images underlines the director's view on memory. Both are unclear, open to interpretation and, like these images, memory can be deceptive. However, working through our memories is also a way of dealing with trauma and (personal) problems.
The sound design is, for the most part, as abstract as the visuals. The sounds steer and guide our mind while trying to interpret the film: moving lines combined with mechanical whizzing sounds recall seismographs, when hearing water dripping our brain sees puddles in the circles that are shown. But the sound also works counter intuitively and misleads the viewer. For the final fragment, Sai Kong Kham uses a piece of music ‘Footsteps from a distance' by Ito. This Burmese musician used to be a teenage pop star, but he gave up his stardom and now makes indie pop and experimental music. Ito is also an important member of Noise in Yangon, a group of musicians working together and sharing resources such as money and instruments to organize shows around the city.
Sai Kong Kham started his career as a sound engineer at various radio stations in Myanmar. Later he switched to a career in film and he studied at Yangon Film School. His debut documentary, “Sweetie Pie”, screened at several international film festivals including Visions du réel, and the Sehsüchte student film festival in Germany. Sai Kong Kham now works as a director and a sound designer for films, working mostly on documentaries and shorts. In 2013, together with 2 childhood friends, he founded the film production company Tagu Films.
‘Mental Landscape' was created during The 2022 Lights From the Underground Workshop organised by 3-ACT a film a Burmese film community film magazine and platform promoting film education and supporting (young) film makers working in difficult times. One of the goals of this program was to help filmmakers to express their thoughts, experiences, trauma and struggles, through more ambiguous forms of art with more abstraction. They introduced the participants to experimental film making and ‘Mental Landscape' shows that this approach works and that there is a future for experimental film in Myanmar
