Embarkation reimagines the traditional Wang Yeh Boat Burning Festival, a Taoist ritual, that takes places in the southern port town of Donggang, Taiwan, every three years. A life-sized boat is built by the community and loaded with the hopes and the fears of the people. The gods are then invoked to pilot the barge up to the heavens in a send-off of fireworks and flames. Embarkation was originally commissioned for Ampersand Live!, a multi-media creative showcase curated by Tomo Nakayama for Forterra.

Venmo: @ShinYu-Pai

A poetry film expressing depression, anxiety and panic. The poet been wanting to write about her experience of mental illness for a while, but hadn’t found an appropriate distancing metaphor until she was asked, on a writing course at the Lumb Bank Arvon centre in Yorkshire, to pick something from the garden to examine closely. She picked a tiny piece of moss from a wall and the poem started there – with close description of the texture of the moss. Whittaker had also recently heard the poet Jen Hadfield talk about limpets; their powerful teeth and ‘home scars’, and some research into this topic fed into the end of the poem. The close-up, claustrophobic use of texture in this film brings the themes to life – you can almost feel the moss growing over you, and into your eyes. The rapid onslaught of images and textures creates a feeling of anxiety and panic, which suits the poem perfectly.

A personal film about my Australian ancestry and identity, employing archival footage of 20th century rural life, given vibrant expression in a hybrid of experimental film, spoken word and music video. My father and his brothers and sisters lived through desperate poverty during a childhood in the Depression-era. Their father abandoned the family, leaving their mother to take care of all six children alone and without work. As the boys reached early adulthood, they took to the rodeo circuit, traveling wide distances between events, a life on the road. Talented horsemen, they became well-known as rodeo champions. Rodeo was appealing to poor country men partly for providing a sense of status they were sorely lacking, and because of the prize money on offer. Rodeo events at that time offered high prize money to the winners, often 20 times more than the average wage for a rural worker. Newspaper reports at the time record the many broken bones for those rough riders, and worse. The heroism of these men who were otherwise in the lowest strata of workers in society, was often accompanied by alcoholism and family violence. Rodeo Days combines what I witnessed of this time and its recent memory in my father’s generation, my own personal family experiences, and wider observations about the history of anglo-Australian society and my personal place as part of it.

We are always special when we start: the lyrical text First works with descriptions and critical considerations of the current western world and consciously combines them with quotes from the classic lyrical canon and old myths from a time in which the world was still in order. Archaic images and an abundance of Quotes from fairy tale and legendary literature. The image of the beginning reverses as an important structural element and combines the different texts into a large, whole fabric.

Hel City is a piece designed and edited with anonymous Super 8 material from the 70s, result of the compilation and collection of films by travelers and tourists around the world. The title is inspired by the name of the scientist Rotman’s wife, creator of the anthropomorphic robot in the movie Metropolis and the goddess of the underworld in the Nordic culture. Both with one beautiful side and another cruel one. Through a woman named Hel, the film reflects on the paradigm changes in the cities and cultures of the planet due to the population explosion. Past, present and future are the axis, approach and questions of this piece that looks at the cities through the rearview mirror to show the way ahead, under the perspective and assuming the oriental conceptions on the notion of time. Hel City is the portrait of a universal Babel.