The sky dims, the streetlamps flicker on. In an old park, in an old city, in the south of Taiwan, two Indonesian immigrants and poets, Asri and Hasan, chat about their day while a camera films them. As long as this camera keeps filming them, the night won’t end. Recalling the films of Alice Diop and Alexandre Koberidze, Park (Taman-taman in Indonesian) builds a world out of pockets of urban green space, where the day and its wearying demands are held back by the leisure, romance, and creativity of migrant laborers in moments of poetic reverie.
Behind the camera are three artist-filmmakers: So Yo-hen, Tien Zong-yuan, and Liao Hsiu-hui. Each comes from a different background (contemporary art, architecture, and art history, respectively) and they call themselves Your Bros. Filmmaking Group. The name reflects the informality and conviviality of their practice, which frequently involves sustained collaboration with Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan. Under official economic and diplomatic policy, Southeast Asians are incentivized to come to Taiwan, studying and laboring in difficult and often exploitative conditions. Park (Taman-taman) can be viewed as the latest and most ambitious in a series of films beginning with Hut (Gubuk) (2018) and Dorm (Ký Túc Xá) (2021), which transform marginal and everyday spaces into places of refuge for these workers, sheltered from the stereotypical and discriminatory attitudes of Taiwanese society. Those past works were staged in large, constructed replicas of real and imagined spaces, and have been exhibited as films and installations. At the 2024 Yokohama Triennale, Your Bros. created a large dormitory structure resembling the one in Dorm, and adorned it with signs made by Vietnamese factory workers on strike.
Park (Taman-taman) deviates from this pattern by using an already-existing outdoor setting, Tainan Park, instead of one fabricated for the film. It might be helpful to think of the film as the record of an encampment. Though initially a bit sheepish, Asri and Hasan keep talking throughout this long night, solidifying into regular presences, like the park’s statues and stones, which start to seem more unnatural and uncanny by comparison. The film is highly circuitous, constantly doubling back on itself and changing the rules and premises of its own narrative—like a game being invented on the spot. As Asri and Hasan’s story unfolds, it pulls in the stories of the people they write poems about: the other Indonesians who regularly hang out in the park, and how they assert their presence there (and intervene in the film by doing so). In keeping with this ethos, the filmmakers conspicuously avoid showing recognizable landmarks and traditional Chinese-style pavilions, setting the stage for an occupation of space by those deemed foreign to Taiwan.
The opening shot of the film—a two-shot of people sitting across from each other, framed in side profile—recalls many similar conversational set-ups from Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Ko Sakai’s Tohoku Documentary Trilogy, a project that epitomizes the collision between documentary filmmaking and socially-engaged participatory art that has increasingly shaped contemporary art across East Asia in the past few decades. The film critic Daisuke Akasaka has observed how the workshop-like settings of participatory art events are used in films as settings “where collective work can be established in opposition to commercial images that uncritically take over from classical images.” Like Hamaguchi and Sakai, Your Bros. uses this interdisciplinary way of working to investigate the intersubjective nature of filmmaking itself as a participatory art practice, and how political agency is given, taken, and shared in the process. If that sounds like a rather dry and academic description of what they do, don’t be deterred. Park (Taman-taman) is charming, playful, and wistfully melancholic. I saw it last year at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and spent a lot of time just walking around at night with friends in parks not unlike those in the film. The confluence of place felt magical, and made the world seem full of secrets.
Park (Taman-taman) screens this evening, March 13, at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of “First Look 2025.”
