Echoes from Tomorrow is a crowdfunded production project that was launched in 2017 by the Phnom Penh based production company Anti-Archive, to support Sreylin Meas, Danech San, and Kanitha Tith to direct their first digital short films: A Million Years (San, 2018), California Dreaming (Meas, 2019), and Tith’s The Crab (in production). Like several of the Anti-Archive films they had previously worked on, the Echoes from Tomorrow films depict urban and rural Cambodia in a process of spatial transformation. In this talk, which draws from my co-authored book with Jasmine Nadua Trice, Practices of Futurity: Spatial Transformation and Southeast Asian Film Cultures, I analyse A Million Years and California Dreaming, alongside two earlier works by Tith: the multi-media installation Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel) from 2011 that took place at Tith’s home by Boeung Kak Lake in central Phnom Penh, a site that was facing imminent demolition by developers, and the 2014 video work, Boding made in Phnom Penh’s iconic White Building three years before its razing. I argue that Meas, San, and Tith explore themes of spatial transformation through gendered, embodied, and imaginative registers that provide a counter-narrative to those of capitalist speculation and development. Drawing from the decolonial, feminist approaches of Aimee Bahng and others, I show how these digital works offer alternative conceptions of value against a wider background of displacement and dispossession.

Speaker
Dr Philippa Lovatt
University of St Andrews, UK

Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Her research focusses on sound, ecocriticism, artists’ moving image, and Southeast Asian film cultures, and she is currently working on two book projects related to these topics. The first is co-authored with Jasmine Nadua Trice (UCLA) entitled Practices of Futurity: Spatial Transformation and Southeast Asian Film Cultures. The second is Reverberant Histories: Expanded Listening in Southeast Asian artists’ film. Philippa has published her research in journals such as Screen; JCMS; Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack, and Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.