Caught in the Act
by Kathy Ou
Park (Tamen-Tamen)
So Yo-hen, Taiwan, no distributor
There is a subgenre of documentaries where the performance itself functions less as an aesthetic flourish than the central narrative engine. In these films, the drama lies less in the staged scenes than in how the performance is assembled, received, and lived through by its participants. In The Act of Killing (2012), the subjects’ enthusiastic reenactments unsettle precisely because they blur memory with play; in Casting JonBenet (2017), the accumulation of audition tapes reveals more about the performers’ interpretations than about the crime itself; and in In Character (2018), the young actors’ commitment becomes the point of tension, turning aspiration into dread. Regardless of the subject matter, what unifies these works is the way the performance folds back onto its making, raising the question of whether the act can—or should—succeed.
No such metric of success is evident for the filmmakers or characters in Park (Taman-taman), the latest work from Your Bros. Filmmaking Group. Consisting of three members—artist So Yo-hen, architect Tien Zong-yuan, and art historian Liao Hsiu-hui, none of whom had a filmmaking background—the Taiwan-based collective has an oeuvre of what could be broadly called performative documentaries with an artistically anthropological twist. Extensively employing field research, workshops, and co-creation techniques in their documentary practices, it often invites its subjects to co-stage fantastical but highly plausible situations. Their first film, Hut (Gubuk) (2019), involves a group of Indonesian migrant workers whom the filmmakers recruited to build the film set, a hut inside a factory. The migrants also create a script together through a series of workshops and star in the final film. Their second, Dorm (Ký Túc Xá) (2021), employs the same method but with several female Vietnamese workers, allowing them more creative freedom in workshopping strategies and solutions to their real-life problems and staging the film. They don’t make a point by dropping themselves into the frame at deliberate moments, but neither are they trying too hard to stay out of it. “With Dorm, we put a lot of effort into doing workshops, to the point where it wasn’t really about making the film anymore—it was just workshops for the sake of the workshops, sometimes even to the extent of doing workshops to sabotage the film,” said the film’s director So Yo-hen in an interview with Artforum.
If the collective’s first two films have used performance as a process to reveal the latent imagination and agency of the migrant workers, Park deviates by being more freeform and poetic. First of all, the central characters in Park consist of two men and their burgeoning relationship with the film and each other over time, rather than a large group. Also, the two men, Asri and Hans, were Indonesian international students rather than day laborers. Lastly, Asri and Hans were recruited to write and read poetry and walk around the park. As So, the film’s credited director, explained in a post-screening Q&A, the instructions for them were simple, if not too minimal: every weekend, they would come to the park to collect stories from other migrants during the day; they would then come together at night to share them in the form of poetry—which So said he believes is the only medium that can so precisely and immediately capture the spirit of an experience.
But that was all. No script, no direction. The confusion of the two participants often feels palpable, as they sometimes wonder out loud what this film is actually about and why the crew is filming them—which is valid, as the filmmakers themselves also did not know at the start what the film would look like, how long they would be filming, and what the end would be. Where is the line between performance and reality when you are instructed to play yourself—as the two men are—and not just any version, but your current version at the present moment? As the production progresses, the two men develop an independent friendship alongside their ideas about what this film is and how they should best live their lives. The filmmakers’ intervention has necessitated these occurrences, but they neither directed nor abetted the participants to act the way they do. Although we are given behind-the-scenes vignettes—as in the speech of the participants directly addressing the production, a crew member entering the frame to adjust the set, or the view of the microphone being held by Asri or Hans—these moments, unlike in other films in this subgenre of artist-led performance-based documentaries, feel more incidental than intentional, and the specifics about the ways and extent of the crew’s engagement with the participants are never clear. And with its largely stationary camera and observational viewpoint, the film pushes the boundaries of hybrid documentary by incorporating practices and conventions of experimental theater and socially engaged art, as if suggesting that the staged, or the imagined, is not too far-fetched from becoming the real.
We are first introduced to Asri and Hans sitting opposite each other at a stone table at Tainan Park in a symmetrical wide shot. It is May, the end of the school year and the beginning of summer, and they begin talking about their respective travel plans as the night falls. Asri, who often dons a cap, and a blue shirt with white stripes, and is the older of the two, is married and has professorial aspirations. What’s holding him back is not knowing if he can make it in Taiwan as both a foreigner and an ambitious academic with humble roots in a poor Indonesian farmer’s family. He is thinking of returning to Indonesia. Hans is younger and more energetic. He is preoccupied with the upcoming graduation ceremony and summer jobs. Participating in this film is a job for both of them, too. As a rule, the film collective always pays participants for their time, a practice that is more common in narrative fiction production rather than documentary.
The chit-chatting stops when someone behind the camera says they are “ready,” signaling the men to begin sharing their work from the day and their written poetry. The men can understand the crew when they speak English, but the latter can’t understand the men who speak to each other in Indonesian and Javanese. It wouldn’t be for days after filming these scenes in the editing room that So and his editors would go through the footage, add translations and subtitles, and the filmmakers would understand what they actually filmed, according to the collective members’ description of their process in various interviews. They would then reflect on these scenes and come up with ideas to workshop with the participants when they meet again on the weekends. This temporal lag in understanding is reflected in the juxtaposition of the stationary and distant way scenes are shot and the budding intimacy between the two participants, who seem to share a secret code and sacred bond as they roam in the dimming light and open space of the park despite the perturbance and performativity demanded by the quietly observing camera.
The poetry becomes a jumping-off point for them to discuss other experiences and observations. After Asri reads a poem he has written about migrants’ love, they launch into a discussion of the circumstances that have enabled Indonesians to migrate to Taiwan. “The romance of workers is interesting and very complex,” Asri says to Hans. “Why don’t I share those love stories and then memorize them for myself?” In contrast, Hans’s writing directly reckons with the migrant’s existential dread. “Which is more foolish, born as a human or born as an Indonesian?” he opens his poem titled “Taiwan as a Choice.” Helpless in the larger geopolitical and economic structures that mostly shape where and how they live, they take satisfaction in the little things. Upon discovering that a large rock is actually an outdoor speaker, the two men fantasize about how amazing it would be if they could use it to broadcast their stories and favorite music for their migrant community, who like to congregate in the park. For their next meeting, Hans shows Asri a logo he has drawn up for “ini Radio Yinni (This Indonesian Radio).” Later, the two would take over a security booth as their fake makeshift studio, where they set the crew’s handheld microphone on the desk and talk into it, narrating program introductions and stories of other migrants, pretending there is an audience tuning in. In these moments of playacting, the film seemingly provides for Hans and Asri a momentary escape from the sense of powerlessness in their unmoored lives. The pale blue light beaming from the booth through the dark night symbolizes the lonely and mesmerizing quest for belonging. In a grand finale, Asri’s and Hans’s poetry is rendered peripheral. Instead, the film gathers dozens of migrant workers on a rainy night, who line up at the makeshift broadcast studio to tell their stories in their own words and languages.
But the illusion will shatter. The inherent employer-employee relationship between the filmmakers and the Indonesian migrant participants is not lost, especially for Asri, who grows increasingly frustrated with the production as it goes on. Perhaps this decision of Asri to leave and move back to Indonesia reflects the limits of the filmmakers’ aesthetic experiment, undermining the idea that progress is inevitable, and social mobility is for everyone. As the night sky of the park brightens, we, the audience-voyeurs, are left with the images of Asri entering his house in his Indonesian village. And life at the Tainan Park goes on, unnoticeably different.