An audio-visual postcard that director Viera Čákanyová sends to the future, based on her fictional conversation with her future virtual copy. She playfully and intimately explores the potential of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in solving complex man-made global problems such as climate change or the crisis of parliamentary democracy. From a curious and critical perspective, she questions the ideal techno-optimistic model of the future and offers a window into an unspecified future where some technologies behave randomly or negatively. By combining super 8, 16mm footage on film stock, special lidar scan technology and point cloud methods, she highlights the tension between analogue and digital future of humanity.
In this powerful documentary, Mama Yang, an 84-year-old woman living in New York, finds herself in correspondence with 45 high security prison inmates she views as her own children. Most are Chinese American immigrants, and see in Mama Yang a mother figure they never knew before they stepped through prison walls.
For Mama Yang though, the story is about more than Christian charity. She had already lived a full life in Taiwan when her husband died at age sixty and her son lost their house in a financial blunder. She moved to the US to start anew and lives with a Taiwanese American granddaughter that remains distant. In a film marked by family separations, Mama Yang writes letters – whether to the incarcerated or to her own granddaughter – to heal lifetimes of wounds.