Admission:
General $10
Student $7
July 22, 2025, 8:30pm
Brooklyn 11205
USA
Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for Erasure that Persists, the third program in the four-part series Decision Moment, presenting artists' films and cinema features that reflect on historical moments of action and inaction and examine cinematic ways of approaching them.
At the core of each screening lies a past event shaped—knowingly or not—by a decision pursued, postponed, or left unmade, whose consequences continue to linger. Rather than reconstructing the past events as heroic acts, the films presented in this program embrace the limits of linear narration as ethical commitment to the complexities of historical decisions, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own actions and decisions in the present.
Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 8–29, 2025, and begin after sunset.
III: Erasure that Persists
Tuesday, July 22, 2025, 8:30pm
Approaching traumatic experiences as refrains that persistently shape personal identities, these films by Tiffany Sia and Iva Radivojević speak through media (television and telephone) in search of new ways for grappling with historical events that have stripped away individual agency. Both works employ cinematic form as a means to contend with memory’s inherent elusiveness, incompleteness, and resistance to being fully transmitted or resolved across generations.
Tiffany Sia, A Child Already Knows (2024, United States, 32 minutes)
A child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same period. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make. The child becomes increasingly aware of the world of adult secrets. A television is flickering. Train sounds whir.
Iva Radivojević, When the Phone Rang (Serbia/USA, 2024, 73 minutes)
Structured through an intimate reconstruction of an important phone call, Radivojević’s film excavates the residue of childhood memories shaped by the moment of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its psychological aftermath. In the protagonist's eleven-year-old mind the phone call erases her entire country, history, and identity. Through a mix of scripted performative recreations When the Phone Rang does not return to the past, instead confronting the impossibility of ever having left it.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
