SUN/SMOKE
Lower left: Sound of Falling (2025). Upper right: Invisible Labor (2024).
[FOREWORD]
Looking Into the Sun
Lk Rigor
Dear Mick,
I hope you are well.1
It’s been almost a month since we met online. You looked bright and awake on a Sunday morning. I was on the other side of the coin, corroborated by my lateness. Mind still half-asleep, I introduced myself with my usual spiel of what I do and noticed the prompts on the shared screen.
One went: “The most recent thing that you learned about & fascinated you.” I’m unsure if you remember my answer, but I shared the YouTube video that I watched while falling asleep.2 What I remembered before entering the dreamworld was the speaker talking about the wisdom we can derive from the biological processes when our wounds heal.3
I’ve since rewatched the video multiple times as I reflect on my own wounds, as well as the pains of the female characters in the three films that I blindly picked4 for this project. Even without consciously looking, perhaps I am drawn to stories about women as I navigate my own womanhood.
“Woman is a pain that never goes away,” Leslie Jamison quotes Greek playwright Menander in her 2014 essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” Or, put simply, “being a woman requires being in pain.”
As I write this, I am in the first days of my monthly cycle. While I have learned to expect and manage it after twenty years, emotional and physical discomfort are ever-present.
Do you have sisters? Have they told you about their red days?5 Nevertheless, I know you are a cinephile. You would know how, compared to a text, an audiovisual medium such as film renders pain more sensuously. I invoke again Jamison, who catalogs different representations of pain: “hurt, suffering, ache, trauma, angst, wounds, damage.”
Still from Sound of Falling
Trauma and devastating events are deeply embedded in Sound of Falling. A collage of four seemingly separate family stories, the film is situated in and connected by a farmhouse in an unnamed German region.6 The omniscient house bears witness to the manifold manifestations of trauma encountered and experienced by its occupants. Like a living body, it gets wounded. Pain permeates. It passes to the next inhabitants, even if they are unrelated by blood.
Still from Luisa
In Luisa, these disasters happen onscreen and offscreen to the titular character. We see how the bus driver takes Luisa to a secluded spot in a forest and asks her to sit on his lap. We don’t see him after, but we hear his noises. We see how a caretaker enters Luisa’s room in the night.7 We don’t see him after, but we see how Luisa has changed following this incident. We process the trauma alongside Luisa.
A system8 allows this to happen. Women are taken advantage of in multiple ways–physically, mentally, emotionally, socially.
Each heavyweight film tries to land gently at their feet: in one case, not landing, but flying.9 In another, a surface-level resolution.10 And then there’s that tiny spark flaring against a formidable structure.11
Still from I Understand Your Displeasure
There is discomfort, but I invite you to sit with it, with them.
Let me know how it goes.
Where There’s Smoke
Mick Gaw
Fragments of data in the form of images, smells, sounds, or words constantly stream into our hippocampus for processing and storage. The average person does little to interrogate these unconscious processes, but memory formation also has integral social functions. When testimonies or lived experiences are mobilized as collective touchstones—as building blocks of larger narratives—their reconstruction becomes explicit. Whether through the erection of a monument, the excavation of a site, or the pained analysis of a canonical text, keeping a memory alive requires immense exertion. This toil is distributed across all levels of society.
Still from Rose
In schools, factories, public squares, and works of art, one may contest the foundations of a social memory. Two films from this year's KinoFest program—a German feature and a Filipino documentary—contend with the exhaustive efforts behind memory work. Inspired by true accounts, Markus Schleinzer’s Rose (2026) is set in a small 17th century Protestant village. An unknown soldier (Sandra Hüller), bearing a bullet wound on her cheek and a claim to inherit a large estate, returns from war.
On the other hand, Joanne Cesario's documentary Invisible Labor (2024) shines light on the unsung legacy of the late archivist Cleto Piedad. Affectionately called “Carlito” by surviving family members, Cesario documents practice and practitioner. The tapes Piedad recorded for the IBON foundation, a non-profit research foundation, and the anecdotes of his loved ones carry his memory forward.
Though both films dwell on the past, Rose takes us back four centuries and halfway around the world. It opens on a lifeless landscape. Trails of smoke escape from the trodden and scorched grassland, like misty stems being uprooted from the soil. The viewer hovers over the aftermath of a battle or pillage. Rendered in black and white and accompanied by the gentle crackle of burning shrubbery, this establishing shot of Rose produces images expected at the end of a film rather than its beginning, gesturing towards a grave trauma.1
German cinema is no stranger to traumatic memories and their imagistic representations. Since the end of the Second World War, cultural institutions in both East and West Germany reckoned with the moral disgrace of the Holocaust. In his 2014 book “German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945,” film scholar Thomas Elsaesser introduces Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Roughly translated as “mastering the past,” a post-Nazi German national identity was built around confronting its genocidal legacy. Whether this was reconciled through monuments or Holocaust films, Elsaesser observed that this cultural fixation “makes the past into something undead,2 a threat or at any rate, a force or agent that has to be wrestled down.”
Rose also presents the traumatic past as a living, violent construction open for the taking. The audience is left with a literal field of possibility through the scarred, vast landscape, bereft of structure, precedent, and expectation. Though the film is set in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, little reference is made to the nature and reason of the conflict. Schleinzer spares viewers from dramatized recreations of kinetic carnage. Perhaps he recognized the limitations of onscreen brutal medieval warfare. Anything too gritty or graphic may have verged on fetishistic.
This decontextualized opening presents an axiom: history is never made in the past. To assert one’s existence is to perform. Our cross-dressing protagonist, Rose, does just that. She masquerades as a dead compatriot, laboriously putting up a front, trudging through the revitalization of the inherited farm, and evading prying eyes. A new battle emerges atop the smoking embers of another.
Similarly, the opening of Cesario’s short places viewers in the wake of great upheaval. A small monitor plays footage from the EDSA Revolution. As the camera zooms in, the plastic borders of the television set are pushed out of frame, sharpening the overexposed pixels. Hundreds under the banner of the Kilusang Mayo Uno flag gather around a convoy, taking place in a procession. A red lorry draped in flags carries two coffins, presumably of workers martyred by the dictatorship. Unlike the restrained, atmospheric sound design in Rose, Invisible Labor’s images are accompanied by lo-fi, swelling guitar riffs of left-wing Filipino rock band The General Strike.
The overhead shot of the blurry masses, marching shoulder to shoulder with the strikers and activists, cuts to cameras on the ground. A sea of bobbing heads push forward. Fists thrust up to the sky. When we find ourselves being sucked into their world, Cesario pulls us out with a hard cut. Suddenly, a youthful face fills the screen. A woman watches the footage intently as her glasses reflect the vibrant CRT. If the opening sequence in Rose set the scene for a history ready to be written, then Invisible Labor presents viewers with the fruits of memory work yielded generations later.
The woman is Cleto’s daughter, Cay Piedad. Now a researcher at the same foundation her father worked in, Cay guides our excavation of Cleto’s legacy. Cesario’s film is not simply about archiving and artifacts. Inscribed in the rewinded recordings of EDSA broadcasts, in the gap between the tape’s insertion and the first flicker of light on the screen, are traces of Cleto’s labor. Alongside Cay, viewers share a temporal experience with the dead archivist, inhabiting the solitary practice of reviewing and rewinding footage nearly lost from history.
The IBON Foundation has passed on the duty to embalm knowledge onto her and current archivists. Yet the battle over the control of historical memory is far from settled. In the single cut that transitions from footage to viewer, a subtle dialectic emerges. The footage of the EDSA protests is at once a triumphant recollection of the past and a lamentation of the contemporary state of national affairs. The archive indeed enshrines images of resistance, but the lessons recorded on these tapes alone couldn’t break the entrenched system of gangster capitalism. The videotaped expressions of rage dodge identification as isolated artifacts of another epoch and continue struggling today against the same political dynasties, oligarch cronies, and their uniformed goons.
Still from Invisible Labor
Towards the film’s conclusion, Invisible Labor includes extracts from recent protests. The lineage of political struggle and memory work are brought to the present, inextricably linked to one another. As long as the people do not resign to stagnation, the momentum of history is pushed by these dual forces. In Schleinzer’s film, Rose’s crusade to rewrite her story rages all the way until her final moments. Before her gender is exposed, Rose establishes themselves as a paragon of the community. Villagers—men in particular—admire the way Rose tirelessly transforms her ramshackle property into thriving farmland, or how the scarred veteran joins them at church and helps fend off bear attacks. Until her deceit was exposed, the people accepted her as another trusted comrade.
As she prepares for her execution, a narrator describes our protagonist’s botched beheading instead of showing it. Authorities maim and burn her body to ensure that Rose and her lie will “remain in no one’s memory.”
Though stripped of her lands, reputation, and pistol, she attempts to reclaim herself amid a patriarchal narrative. The camera is affixed at the back of Rose’s head, against the stone wall of her cell. With her back slightly hunched, she works away at her final testament. She recounts the events on her own terms but also indulges the fantasy of what could have been. Even in the face of imminent execution, Rose writes in hopes that the future will hear her. In a sense, Rose’s fiction represents those stripped of voice: victims who laid the foundations for the victors’ grand narratives.
In an interview with IndieWire, Schleinzer reveals that the film’s screenplay is the “[…] culmination of centuries of real women who adopted male identity to claim autonomy or to survive.” Reinforcing that idea, Rose’s off-screen narrator leaves viewers with the line “We alone imagined and invented ourselves,” while the camera imparts one last close up. Against an empty backdrop, reminiscent of a museum portrait or a mugshot, we stare into Rose’s eyes one last time. While Rose’s prosecutors blatantly lean against legalities and virtues to entrench a conservative political legacy, conversely, Rose embraces reinvention and deceit to carve her own space.3
In many respects, Rose and Invisible Labor exist worlds apart. Their people, places, and memories (even their frames) are incomparable. Yet Schleinzer and Cesario both call upon viewers to reassess their relationships to the past and how that, in turn, may inform their present actions. Both films are attuned to the material conditions in which memories are allowed to exist or perish. Watching both films side by side reveals a common consensus: that history is a work-in-progress. It is not a set of facts passively recorded, but a laborious assertion of narratives that only the future may judge or forget.
Lk Rigor is primarily a listener and an observer of connections and absences. In small or large ways, these modest acts register in her endeavors in research, writing, curation, and art management.
Mick Gaw is a film critic and writer that has contributed to publications like Screen Slate and Little White Lies. An incoming student at University College London’s Film Studies MA program, his critical interest is in the moving image’s relationship to history and political economy.