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Original Film Title: THREE BETRAYALS
Director’s Name: Catalina Ouyang
Writer’s Name: Catalina Ouyang
Producer: Catalina Ouyang
Country of Origin: United States
Country of Filming: United States
Runtime: 30 minutes
Film Description:
THREE BETRAYALS is an experimental film that takes as its conceptual center the three-body problem, which, in physics and mathematics, describes a chaotic system between particles. The chaos of the three-body problem lies in its indeterminacy; the motion of particles cannot be predicted. The film looks to the three-body problem and its components as a framework for the interrelation between self, mother, and grandmother. The unsolvable nature of the three-body problem echoes lapses in a family’s knowledge of one another as the artist takes up their own unsolvable project: to recover intergenerational histories through repetition, exhaustion, and gesture.
Moving back and forth between the past and present, the film intersperses dance footage and voiceover with recent footage of their mother and grandmother. Also punctuating these personal documentations are scenes from the life of Anne Sexton, the American poet who was alcoholic, suicidal, and abusive to her daughter. Ouyang orients Sexton as a cipher within their work that exemplifies how they are “constantly approaching some edge of annihilation.” As the artist states, “I think there is something profound and complicated to be said for identifying with a so-called monster, even calling yourself forth to love a monster.” By collapsing their personal histories with Sexton’s biography and mathematical theories of motion, Ouyang explores the body as a vehicle of self-mutability, temporal transference, and rapturous discovery.