Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film Section Features Work by 30 Filmmakers

The phrase “attention economy” has gained currency in an ever more distracted world.

An art fair like Art Basel Hong Kong next week offers thousands of ways to spend attention, usually in short bursts as visitors make the rounds and land their eyes on a work of interest briefly, over and over.

The film section at the fair requires slowing down, given that the medium is, in art world parlance, time-based, a term used for any work that has duration as a dimension.

Art Basel — established in 1970 in Switzerland — first offered a film section in 1999 when the organization had just one fair.

Hong Kong has had a film section since its second edition, in 2014. In the past decade, more than 300 films have been shown there, including those by well-known makers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lou Ye, Cheng Ran, Lu Yang, Marina Abramovic, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Takashi Murakami.

“The film sector is very well received in our Hong Kong show,” said Angelle Siyang-Le, the fair’s director. “The younger generation responds to the material well, and they’re more open to the moving image.”

Most screenings take place in an auditorium inside the fair’s venue, the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, that has around 100 seats, and the program usually draws a “full house,” Siyang-Le said.

This year’s program, “In Space, It’s Always Night,” will feature seven screenings and the work of 30 filmmakers, mostly short films. It is free and open to the public; limited editions of the films are for sale on a case-by-case basis.

It was curated by Billy Tang, the executive director of Para Site, the Hong Kong contemporary art center that was founded in 1996, and some of Tang’s Para Site colleagues. They also worked with outside curators.

“Our hope is that this project becomes almost like a film festival in its scope and ambition,” Tang said. Each day’s screening lineup will have a different theme.

There is one feature-length work in the program: the 75-minute “Vampires in Space,” by Isadora Neves Marques. That film, Tang said, “sets the tone for the overall program.”

“Vampires in Space” was part of Portugal’s pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Originally it was a three-channel installation, meaning that different scenes were shown simultaneously.

At the Art Basel screening, it will be shown as one continuous feature for the first time. It is being presented by the Umberto Di Marino gallery of Naples, Italy.

As vampire movies go, Marques’s film is highly atypical. There is no blood and no horror — it’s a moody, philosophical journey. The characters mostly just talk, musing on their human past and their uncertain future, given that they live forever, as they hurtle in a spaceship toward an unknown destination.

“It’s a dysfunctional family movie,” Marques said. “It’s true of my other films, too.” She added, “Science fiction and fantasy runs through my work.”

The Portuguese filmmaker, who once lived in New York, shot the film in Lisbon during an early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. She moved to Hong Kong last year.

Tang said that the film’s unusual storytelling, mixing sci-fi and social commentary, “echoes with the best forms of culture emerging in Hong Kong — a refusal to be shoehorned and categorized.”

“Vampires” is one of several films in the program looking at queer identity, and identity in general. Marques said of the film, “Several of the characters are trans, and I’m a trans woman.”

One of the film’s ideas, she said, is that “you’re more than the identity that you’re supposed to perform.”

One of the works in the program that has a queer theme, the 24-minute “Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work” (2018), takes inspiration from a true story dating from the 18th century, uncovered in a Portuguese archive by the filmmaker Carlos Motta.

“I found the story of an enslaved man, who was kidnapped in West Africa and sent to Brazil,” said Motta, who is Colombian and now lives in New York. The African man, José Francisco Pereira, developed a practice creating amulets to protect his fellow laborers, mixing African and Christian traditions.

“Authorities labeled him a witch, and he was tried for witchcraft,” Motta said. “In the trial, he said he had sex with the devil in the form of a white man. They said he was not only a witch, he was a sodomite; he was tried for both.”

In Motta’s film, presented by the Paris gallery Mor Charpentier, Pereira gets agency over his own story as the narrator — and Motta thinks the tale is relevant right now.

“In many places in the world, sodomy continues to be punishable by death,” said Motta, who currently has a retrospective of his work on view at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in Spain. “So it’s an opportunity to reflect on that.”

A dreamier, more abstracted take on history comes from Cao Shu, of Hangzhou, China, in his 15-minute work “Phantom Sugar” (2023), presented by ShanghART of Shanghai.

It features smoothly gliding drone footage of a now-defunct sugar factory in Guangdong, China, originally built in 1935 and now a cultural heritage site.

The title, Cao said, refers to fluctuating sugar prices.

He did extensive research for the film, including interviewing around 30 people who used to work at the factory, but he calls it “science fiction.” No people appear in the film; instead, digitally created ants are shown carrying leaves through the abandoned facility.

“It touches on the memory of socialism in 20th-century China,” Cao said. “The factory is like a creature, and the people inside it have memories.”

The film also touches on the increasing use of vertical farming controlled by artificial intelligence, contrasted with the past represented by the factory.

Cao said he liked the tension of presenting a nuanced look at socialism and capitalism at a highly commercial event like an art fair: “It’s a very interesting clash.”