Description
With an opening performance by Isu Mignon Mignonne & Mandhla.
Taxi Stories is a mosaic of stories from three different Asian cities in which the paths of the rich and poor cross in taxis. A closeted gay Beijing cab driver tries to seduce a rich passenger, a pregnant Hong Kong trophy wife starts to develop feelings for her new Indonesian maid, and a Jakartan slum orphan becomes infatuated with a Western female backpacker. All three characters desperately want to connect on a basic human level but ultimately find themselves a hindrance. In contemporary Asia, where social mobility is linked to increasing wealth, money divides and separates each of them making it harder to become who they really want to be.
Isu Mignon Mignonne (it/it/its) questions how itself* appears in the world, and twists it through various kinds of performance. It can be ritualistic, it can be multi-layered, it can be cathartic. It resurrects the invisible queer death through the green screen. It wears the female figure as an anaglyph 3D illusion. It reclaims the power of instrumentalizing one’s body and praises the sacred hole through the vibration of the snake.
Mandhla. is a trans-feminine gender non-conforming body born and raised in Zimbabwe, Africa. Currently residing between Berlin and Cologne, she brings a blend of experimental R&B and Soul music intertwined with visual projections and performative dancing. Her music speaks of the daily trials that Trans*, enby and femme* immigrant bodies experience daily with love, identity, sex, and acceptance.
Doris Yeung is an Asian American filmmaker from San Francisco. Her first feature film Motherland (2009) was named one of the ten best Asian American Films of 2009 by Asian Pacific Arts Magazine and the Hollywood Reporter called her a “filmmaker to watch”. Her second feature film Taxi Stories (2017) has been screened in over 30 festivals around the world. Since 2002, she has lived and worked in Amsterdam and is the founder of CinemAsia Film Festival, Netherlands.
Sarnt Utamachote is a filmmaker, photographer and curator. He is a co-founder of un.thai.tled, a collective of Thai-diasporic creatives in Germany, through which he curated un.thai.tled Film Festival Berlin as well as Beyond the kitchen: Stories of Thai Park. His video installation I Am Not Your Mother (2020) was officially exhibited at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
