The Whispering Star (2015) by Sion Sono| 100min | PG | Japanese with English subtitles

Ticketed admission

Showtimes
Sat 8 Nov: 4.00pm
Fri 14 Nov: 4.30pm
Sat 22 Nov: 4.00pm
Sat 13 Dec: 4.00pm
Sat 20 Dec: 4.00pm
Sat 27 Dec: 4.00pm

In a distant future where machines dominate the universe and the human population has nearly vanished, the android Yoko travels alone in a spaceship resembling an old Japanese villa, delivering parcels to last few remaining humans. As Yoko moves through desolated planets, the curious android reflects on humanity’s nostalgic desires, and what it means to be human.

A lo-fi, sci-fi arthouse film by Sion Sono, The Whispering Star marks a contemplative shift from the filmmaker’s maximalist style, blending quiet sci-fi with poetic introspection, with nods to Kubrick and Tarkovski in a meditative exploration of solitude and technological legacy.

Playtime (1967) by Jacques Tati | 124min | PG | French with English subtitles

Ticketed admission

Showtimes
Fri 14 Nov: 6.30pm
Sun 14 Dec: 4.00pm
Sun 21 Dec: 4.00pm
Sun 28 Dec: 4.00pm

Monsieur Hulot finds himself lost in a hyper-modern, ultra-sleek version of Paris, filled with overcomplicated gadgets and rows of reptitive architecture.

The sprawling set, known as ‘Tativille’, was specially constructed for the film at the edge of Paris. The detailed steel-and-glass cityscape took over three years to complete and was shot on 70mm, making it one of the most expensive, and impressive, French films to be made at the time. Despite becoming a commercial failure at its release, Playtime is now considered to be Jacques Tati’s magnum opus, and one of the greatest films ever made.

Jacques Tati’s masterpiece is both critique and prophecy of modern life, calling for a more balanced future with technology that embraces warmth, colour and the messy humanness of it all.

Universal Language (2024) by Matthew Rankin | 89min | PG | Persian, French with English subtitles

Ticketed admission

Showtimes
Sun 9 Nov: 4.00pm
Thu 13 Nov: 2.00pm
Sun 16 Nov: 4.00pm
Sun 23 Nov: 4.00pm

In a mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg, the lives of multiple characters interweave with each other in surprising and tender ways.

An homage to Iranian cinema with Canadian inflections, Matthew Rankin’s absurdist comedy finds its heart and humour across borders, language and identities. The alternative world of Universal Language is infused with warmth, carrying a hopeful message that our relationship with one another is not predicated on differences, but perhaps in gestures of care and understanding. 

Awards:
Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award | Cannes Film Festival 2024
Arthouse Cinema Award | Hamburg Film Festival 2024
Bright Horizons Award | Melbourne International Film Festival 2024
Best Canadian Feature Film | Vancouver International Film Festival 2024

The Last Angel of History, 1996, by John Akomfrah | 45min| PG13 (Some Coarse Language) | English

Ticketed admission

Showtimes
11 Jan (Sun): 2.30pm
18 Jan (Sun): 2.30pm

One of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, John Akomfrah's genre-bending documentary on black consciousness traces the origins and impact of Afrofuturism through the eyes of a man known as the Data Thief, who seeks the keys to the future.
 

Featuring interviews and performance clips by artists such as George Clinton, Sun Ra and science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler, Akomfrah amplifies the futuristic tenor of the film by intercutting these scenes with images of Pan-African life from different periods of history, jumping between timelines and generations. 

Nhà Cây (The Tree House), 2019, by Minh Quý Trương | 84min| PG13 (Brief Nudity) | Vietnamese with English subtitles

Ticketed admission

Showtimes
11 Jan (Sun): 4pm
18 Jan (Sun): 4pm

In the year 2045, a filmmaker who relocated to Mars attempts to make a film about life on Earth, juxtaposing his own displacement with recordings of the Ruc and Cor peoples, ethnic groups driven from their cave homes and tree houses during the American invasion of Vietnam. This footage is interspersed with American propaganda films depicting the post-war resettlement of these Vietnamese communities.

Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understanding of home.

Siamese Futurism, 2021, by Montika Kham-on

8min 40sec | Thai/ Isan with English subtitles
 

This music video re-images the prophecies of the Phibun rebellion as a futuristic vision for Isaan in order to reverse the stereotypical ‘backward’ temporality assigned to the region and its people. Drawing from the motifs of science fiction, it highlights the Isaan people’s centuries-old, revolutionary imagination envisioning Thailand’s future.
 

Montika Kham-on is a video artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. Her practice explores collective fear, speculative visions of the future, and the struggle over definitions outside dominant narratives, she centers emotional landscapes and embodied knowledge. Drawing from theater, dance, and ritual, not as references, but as methods of resistance, her work engages movement as a language in its own right.

Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous ᤗᤠᤎᤠᤶᤒᤠ ᤋᤠᤕᤧᤶ, 2023, by Subash Thebe Limbu

14min 56sec | Nepalese with English subtitles
 

Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous ᤗᤠᤎᤠᤶᤒᤠ ᤋᤠᤕᤧᤶ borrows its name from the verbal inflection that specifies an action or state is happening at a particular time in the future; ‘tayem’ being future and ‘ladhamba’ being continuous in Indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) language. The work imagines a conversation between the historical figure Kangsore, an 18th century Yakthung warrior fighting the Gorkha colonial army, and Yakthung time-traveller from a distant future.
 

Based on Limbu’s critical framework of Adivasi Futurism, the work connects these two people from the same community but from very different timelines — one a reminder of the fight against colonialism, and the other, from a future we might want to strive for. Converging the two timelines, the work situates the viewer in between past and future, asking them to consider their own role within this space-time continuum.
 

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan), located in present-day eastern Nepal. He works with film, sound, music, and painting. His Yakthung name is ᤋᤠᤱᤛᤠᤱ Tangsang (Sky). Drawing from socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction, his works engages the notion of time, climate change, and indigeneity through the critical lens of Adivasi Futurism, a framework he has been developing over several years.

Of Other Tomorrows Never Known, 2023, by Natasha Tontey

15min 54sec| English, Bahasa Indonesia, Tontemboan with English subtitles
 

How do we talk with the spirits? Of Other Tomorrows Never Known interweaves notions of care with ancestral knowledge and speculative fiction, threading stories from mythology, archaeological ruins and urban cultures.
 

The work emerges from Natasha Tontey’s background and personal history of participating in various rituals by communities from Minahasa, an indigenous community in the Northern part of Sulawesi island, Indonesia, offering an insight into Minahasan cosmology and an alternative approach to technology.
 

Natasha Tontey is a Minahasan artist based in between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings.

spaces as traces, 2025, by Shi Yun Teo

9min 35sec| Mandarin and English with English subtitles

Existing between the domains of architectural, technological and spiritual mediums, ‘spaces as traces’ features found footage, Teo’s body of archival material concerns with Singapore’s architecture and Taoist religious rituals, as well as three-dimensional rendered animation of deities in an imagined science fiction of Chinese mythology. Here, the I Ching engages in a dialogue with artificial intelligence and architectural elements. Spiritual language becomes digital language.
 

Shi Yun Teo is a multidisciplinary artist, recent graduate from Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL. Her work usually takes the form of photography and filmmaking. She creates narrative and abstract works that feature historic documents, archival footages and personal recordings: visualising how spaces frame communal memory, evoking themes of reincarnation, dislocation, and return.