Ghosthead

Ghosthead begins with a father’s incarceration under British colonial rule in Malaysia for rubber theft, unraveling three generations of migration, displacement, and fractured kinship across China and Malaysia. Through repurposing the physical archive of the Malayan Emergency (British Malayan anti-colonial war) loaned from the National Archives, UK, the film deconstruct the language of colonial propaganda 'marketing materials' to retell the family history of the artist's father based on real life oral testimony of a family relative. The film interrogates colonial violence and modernization’s toll on familial bonds, while imagining fictive technologies as tools for reparation and fictional healing. 

This film was developed during CounterArchive: Fictional Healing Collective Filmmaking Lab [Ali Alasri, Kevin Bathman, Julien Chen, Yih-Wen Chen, Sabine Groenewegen, Jakob van Klang, Joshua Kok, Anthony Ngoya, Ong Jo-Lene, Yvonne Tan, Xu Jen Teo, Dahong Hongxuan Wang, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Eddie Wong, Saubin Yap, Ben Yau] with the support of British Council Connections Through Culture and Malaysia Design Archive.