Moving Image
Beneath the Shell of Sound, working title
Beneath the Shell of Sound is a 16mm essay film that drifts through fragments of memory and landscape. At its heart is the cicada: its brief, defiant song a resistance to death, a memory that refuses to fade. In this film, directors Chanthila Phaophanit and Cuan Roche explore what remains after things are gone, and how light, sound, and silence carry the traces of what we can’t fully hold onto.
Still House | 2023
Still House is a family ghost story retold. We peer into a conversation suspended in time as we journey through a tunnel - a space between and a space of potential. The story once told in Lao, translated into French, and then rendered into English raises questions about what is lost or transformed in the act of retelling. Chanthila is interested in the fractures created by translation and how stories shift and distort as they pass through languages and histories.
Red Jeep | 2023
In Red Jeep Chanthila meditates on her father and ponders on a childhood myth. We are placed on the outside looking in on a story that reveals Lao’s complex social and political history.
We Have Only What We Remember | 2023
We Have Only What We Remember is a quiet reflection on memory, disappearance and the fragility of images. A video of two people embracing is slowly taken over by fire, a gesture that feels like destruction and preservation at the same time. In burning the image, Chanthila speaks to the impossibility of truly capturing the past. What remains is not the moment itself, but its trace, a memory of a memory. As with oral histories and ghost stories, what we remember is unstable, shifting, and always at risk of vanishing. The film becomes an archive of impermanence, where cinema, like memory, flickers briefly before fading into nothingness.
