Directing
An introduction to Kim-Trang's video series on metaphorical and physical blindness, ALETHEIA explores the interconnected issues of cosmetic surgical alteration of the eyelids, technology, language, race and gender. This video is a highly graphic examination of dominant notions of normalcy, beauty and their effects and impositions on the body. Part of the Blindness Series.
An experimental videotape addressing issues of surveillance and technology that allow us to see where we normally cannot. Highlights several narratives revolving around video surveilliance -- not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument, but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials, and society's insatiable voyeurism.
How can we make visible the invisible? How can we "see" our lost loved ones? In EPILOGUE, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tran T. Kim Trang looks for answers to these questions in the audio recordings of her dead mother, the handwritinng of the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the ultrasound photos of her newborn baby. Finding no ready-made answers, Tran invites us to reflect about life and death in this moving video essay about motherhood and mourning. EPILOGUE is the eight and final installment of Tran's THE BLINDNESS SERIES.
Re-framing the media representation of the Los Angeles rebellion and contextualizing its significance by locating it historically and politically in a timeline with the pro-Democracy demonstrations in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the AIDS activist movement in the U.S.
A visit with seven cosmetic surgeons specializing in surgical eyelid alteration. Depicts this procedure as self-mutilation, a desperate cure and extreme antidote to undesirable "Oriental" features. Includes a textual description of amygdalectomy through the orbital socket.
Amaurosis is an experimental documentary about Nguyen Duc Dat, a blind, American Asian guitarist living in Little Saigon, California. Dat was a 'triple outcast': blind, Amerasian and an impoverished orphan. Beyond their disabilities, this community of Vietnamese-Americans is oppressed on many levels: language and cultural differences, immigrant and lower income status, and societal misunderstanding and alienation. AMAUROSIS strives to present the life of one member from this unique community and promote his rich contributions.
Experimental video about word-blindness and metophor, with accounts of Giambattista Vico's theory on the origin of language and Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on aspect-blindness.
The third installment in the series opens with two women who are blindfolded and making love. This visually lush and erotic exploration of blindness investigates questions of desire and power, empowerment and sexuality and AIDS/HIV as symbolized by the sense of sight.
"I came across a New York Times article about a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, the largest group of such people known in the world. Hysterical blindness is sight loss brought about by traumatic stress with little or no physical cause." This tape delves into two histories: the history of hysteria and of the Cambodian civil war. It examines the ascendant quality of personalities that survive great trauma and loss and looks at how individuals normalize experiences and histories of "unassimilatable" pain.
