Shades of Orange
Shades of Orange (2024)
Credits
written, directed, edited, and shot by- May Wanhua Braaten
additional camera- Kartik Vaish, Emily Hey, Claire Qiaoping Braaten
lighting and production assistance- Emily Hey
is a short experimental film based on a personal nonfiction essay that reconciles a web of seemingly far-flung experiences in an expansive filmic collage: classical music performance pedagogies, complicated mother-daughter dynamics, sexual assault, seeing the blood moon rise at the beach, driving alone on a snowy night.
In constructing this personal history, the film explores the notion of embodied cognition and somatic memory, specifically Claudia Sheets-Johnstone’s notion of tactile-kinesthetic intelligence, or a sort of first-person awareness of movement. The film also operates within Martin Heidegger’s concept of ecstatic temporality, where time is not experienced linearly, but rather as – to abridge Reg Lilly’s words – a raindrop in which past, present, and future continuously intersect in a single, fluid framework that defines human existence.
Shades of Orange won the Jury Prize at the 2024 Golden Acorn Awards and has been screened as a part of SUSTAIN series.
Watch the film here.
