flower codec lotus (2018)

• 75%
• 2018
• Gio Lingao

A Filipino tourist finds refuge in a blooming lotus flower in Vienna. The film explores movements of memories constantly reiterating its process of renewal. It is instigated through tensions in time between the filmmaker's typhoon-damaged early childhood photographs (approximately from 1993-2000) and his personal travel account of his short stay in Vienna, Austria (November 21-26, 2017) – which was shot with an old VHS camcorder. Poetically meditating on identity and ephemerality, the deconstructed images of documented personal history forces notions of fiction and reality to an ending. Thus, the emitted silence impedes shades of its culture to surface; depicting a self-portrait of a modern Filipino broken by the living traumas of his troubled nation.