4A x Platform Asia: Summer Shorts presents a considered selection of short films created by Australia and UK-based filmmakers of Asian diaspora. Featuring the films of River Yuhao Cao 曹宇豪 (UK), Allison Chhorn (AUS), Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee (UK/SGP), Roxy Rezvany (UK) and Grace Tan (AUS), this screening showcases the breadth of talent working across experimental fiction, documentary and the space between. 

These five films explore concepts of queerness, grassroots resistance, intergenerational care, environmental pollution and heritage from a diverse range of perspectives, bound together through an atmosphere of languid tropical heat. In restless summer nights and lazy afternoons, 4A x Platforma Asia: Summer Shorts takes us into karaoke rooms with demons, a DIY fashion house in Jordan, and dreamlike excursions into the equatorial tropics.

Screening order:

Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Tropic Temper (2024), 16m 

Singapore is said to be a product of forgettings. Tactical amnesia is, perhaps, just another regulating strategy. But can you forget at will? Tropic Temper cracks open Singapore’s code as a site of a disciplined tropics and enters its environmental forgetting program realised via surveillant climatic infrastructures and extreme terraforming. Through the voices of Nancy, a Peranakan nyonya ghost and J.A.C.E., an omniscient intelligence of Holy Origin, the film surveys the city-country's last remaining mangroves at risk of being transformed into connected e-gardens, while new energy and chemical processing islands rise out of the ocean. Within the smooth and all-sensing new nature where botanical prowess and technological spectacle collide, nymphs, attracted to the island's energy pools, visit to feed on the lingering underbelly of petrol-washed coral reefs and hollow karaoke lounges.

Roxy Rezvany, Wifi Rider (2020), 12m

Life is lonely for young Palestinian, Shukri. He spends his days on the internet, immersed in a world where Western popstars preach self-love and unity, and where he can forget the lack of acceptance he faces in everyday life. But a life dreaming of paradise abroad does not bode well for a teenager stuck in East Jerusalem. What he desperately wants is to connect with others like him, who feel caught between an occupation, globalisation, and the universal growing pains that come with adulthood. In this 16 mm documentary film, we follow Shukri from a childhood in East Jerusalem to moving to the hillside apartments of Amman, Jordan, and the sandy shores of the Dead Sea. We discover the origins of his life as the ‘WifiRider’, and how he channelled his frustrations into art and fashion on the internet.

Allison Chhorn, Blind Body (2021), 15m

Partially blind, grandmother Kim Nay depends on touch and sound to navigate her daily routine of eating, resting and listening to Khmer news. Time moves fluidly as Kim’s sense of self slowly begins to dilate, conjuring long-dormant memories.

River Yuhao Cao 曹宇豪, The Glass Essays (2025), 16m

​​Taking inspiration from Anne Carson’s skeletal image, The Glass Essays experiments with the ritual of mourning as a psychoanalytic method in filmmaking, and a mode of exploring fluid identities and queerness, especially Cao’s personal experience of growing up queer in a small Southern Chinese town. 

The film arose from artist’s own memories of his grandparents working in funeral processions in his hometown in Nanxian, Hunan where they would travel and perform with a mobile truck-stage across the region. The Glass Essays re-examines the performative role of lamentation in regional Chinese cultures through a queer lens, a process of fluidity and ritualisation as a way to confront the past and its ghosts.

Grace Tan, A Daydream with Fini (2024), 7m

On a sweltering summer's day in Izamal, Fini and her friend discuss a dream. Together they dream of travelling to the pyramids, the jungle and cenotes as they await the construction of the Tren Maya.