When We Close the Box

Directing / Editing / Camera | Kano Yanagiya, Phene James, Sharo Liang

Duration | Oct. - Nov. 2020 Location | Central Saint Martin / Bloomsbury Film Festival, London, UK     

We made “journey of death” as our topic, aiming to use object as a theme to build up a short film on a 1 square meter platform. Considering the symbolic meaning of materiality and disappearance (death), leads us to focus on developing the theme of funeral and its ritual, following with funerary objects that comes from different cultures and contain our personal memories inside.   

During the process, we go into depth about each other’s funeral culture and myth that relates to death, such as Lady of Shalott, and with our experience of attending funeral and other art work about death. We spend relatively long period of time to develop our story board that blend the visual elements with the narrative. Considering the fact that we never experience death by our own, we create our own imaged journey of death, layered with different cultural tradition, for instance the use of lotus is from Taiwanese funeral object, the use pomegranate associate with Persephone, the boat carried the figure relate to the North Europe’s tradition of burial at sea, and we use old Japanese grave field advertisement in between each scene as a transition.