Facing Forward

Name: Facing Forward
Released: 1999
Duration: 10 min

1999 · 10 min

not streaming

In reframing and re-editing existing ethnographic films, Tan exposes their anthropological underpinnings and questions the conventions of filmmaking. What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? How can one ever know another? The voice-over, a fictional dialogue taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, may offer an answer. The explorer Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan are speaking about travel and looking back on the past, when Polo observes, “The traveler recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

Crew

Director Fiona Tan

Cast

O
Owen Oppenheimer
Narrator

Crew

Director — Fiona Tan

External reads

No articles linked yet.

🔥 Hot takes

warming up the wall…

Intermission

GO DEEPER

Turn the obscurity dial up. There's a lot further down to go.

Deal me more →

Metadata & streaming data: TMDB (JustWatch). This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.