28 Jun 2025 | Music Memorabilia Swap: 5pm – 9pm / Screening: 7.30pm – 9.30pm
Curated by Sonali Joshi
Screening Rating: PG13
Venue: Platform, Objectifs
Entry by donation at the door, minimum donation: $10 – $15. Please RSVP here.
MUSIC MEMORABILIA SWAP | 5pm – 9pm, free admission. Limited slots available, please register here to swap.
Swing by from 5pm on the same day as Now Showing: Meet Me In Song for a swap session full of music memories! Got a record you’re ready to pass on? Old magazines or band merchandise someone else would love? Bring your pre-loved music treasures and trade stories (and stuff) with fellow fans. Give your items a second life—and maybe find a gem of your own!
Note: Interested participants for the Music Memorabilia Swap can register here, limited slots are available.
Participants also have the option to sell their items in the event that a swap exchange does not work out.
NOW SHOWING: MEET ME IN SONG FILM SCREENING | 7.30pm – 9pm
Curated by Sonali Joshi
Music and film are playmates, companions, they go hand in hand. Film leans on music in more ways than one; the mood, the tone, the atmosphere within a film so often shaped by music. Indeed, music has often led the way for film and it can lift film. In her director’s statement, Viv Li (ACROSS THE WATER), one of the filmmakers featured in this programme, talks of how Wong Kar-wai once described music as being the ‘truest’ form of art.
This programme of short films explores music as an intrinsic element to film, where it plays a key role rather than merely a theme, where music takes us to another place – pointing to memory, contemplation, fleeting moments of the everyday, passing encounters.
Each of the films in this programme is punctuated by music in ways that create sensorial and experiential moments that often draw upon memories that encapsulate a sense of nostalgia – through analogue, vinyl, radio, hip-hop, rap, blues, ballads, as well as classical music.
In ACROSS THE WATERS, a Taiwanese ballad sung by Teresa Teng plays as a teenage girl and mysterious truck driver share a brief moment of connection in a film that explores notions of freedom and belonging.
In STAY AWAKE, BE READY, everyday moments at street food stalls and drinking spots are captured in which a conversation between three young men is disrupted by a motorbike accident. The film begins with a Vietnamese guitar-based song which plays as life unfolds on a street corner. A complete shift in tone then occurs as we vicariously listen to Ave Maria coming through the headphones of one of the young men.
Fingers flicking over vinyl create their own rhythm in a record store in Japan at the start of Tune. Inspired by the documentary Desperate Man Blues about musician and record collector Joe Bussard, the film plays out to the tune of DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND by Blind Willie Johnson, as nostalgic images of the sea and a road trip flicker past.
The opening scene of NEW LAND BROKEN ROAD introduces us to three young hip-hop dancers with a burst of Cambodian rap music. This tone later shifts to more traditional Cambodian pop music with a playful dance routine in the same hip-hop vein, representing the hopes and dreams of youth alongside a sense of displacement, all against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape.
The final film in this programme represents something of a metamorphosis in which Thai noise musician Thom Assajan-Jakgawan (known as Thom AJ Madson) confines himself to a small room as experiments in sound and meditation play out.
Within this programme there is a distinctly playful tone where music and sound are often prioritised over dialogue, where nostalgia and memory collide, whilst also pointing to a sometimes disconcerting present or an unknown future.
Films in the programme:
Across The Waters by Viv Li / 15 min / 2024 / France
Stay Awake, Be Ready (Hãy Tỉnh Thức Và Sẵn Sàng) by Pham Thien Am / 14 min / 2019 / Vietnam/South Korea/USA
Tune by Kaori Oda / 6 min / 2018 / Japan
New Land Broken Road by Kavich Neang / 15 min / 2018 / Cambodia
Confusion is Next by Pathompon Mont Tesprateep / 22 min / 2018 / Thailand
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About the Curator
Sonali Joshi is a moving image curator, writer and film access specialist based in Tokyo. She is Founder & Director of Day for Night (UK) and Not That Films (Japan) working across curatorial projects, distribution and subtitling.
As a curator and writer, Sonali has particular interests in the relationship between cinema and architecture, the intersection between sound, image and text on screen, small national film industries and filmmaking collectives, and cultural activism. More broadly, Sonali’s curatorial practice seeks to expand access to independent cinema and artists’ film, particularly underrepresented and under-acknowledged areas of moving image culture.
Sonali has a PhD in Cinema Studies (University of Glasgow, UK). She previously worked in film programming at Cornerhouse (now HOME, Manchester, UK), film distribution in Paris and managed the translation-subtitling department of a London based post-production house. She has taught and mentored at National Film and Television School and London Film School among other UK universities, and has served on various festival juries including International Film Festival Rotterdam.
When: 28 Jun 2025, 5pm - 9.30pm
