JF2025 – JF Time Machine
FOREWORD
This frantic world is undergoing dramatic transformation—division, reboot, and technological leaps. I believe there is no better time than now for “Jumping Frames” to ride the tide. This year, with the theme “Time Machine”, we will embark on a time-traveling journey through light and shadow, exploring a century of dance film evolution with our audience.
For the 2025 “Jumping Frames” programme, we have curated a series of retrospective screenings, spanning avant-garde dance films from the early 20th century, works from the inaugural “Jumping Frames”, and innovative experimental contemporary digital works. This is both a tribute to screendance history and a reflection on today’s shifting social landscape: in an era of rapid technological advancement, how do we reinterpret memory and imagine the future through bodily movement?
In this time of division and reboot, “Jumping Frames” is not just a festival; it is a time machine that allows us to traverse light and shadow and rediscover the infinite possibilities of the body. We warmly invite you to join us on this screendance journey that bridges the past and the future.
SANG Jijia
CCDC Artistic Director
Curator’s Note
Not long ago, a German director shared his story that left a profound impression on me.
During the pandemic, he made a film about the sense of absence and emptiness in a grand opera house—shooting entirely on 16mm film. His deliberate choice not to convert it to digital was both simple and radical: anyone who wants to experience his film must be physically present in the cinema with him.
This story resonates deeply with me. Cinema screenings and live performances are pilgrimages of time and space—collective experiences that remain essential to our artistic practice and our festival-making, whether it’s intimate viewing of Terayama Shuji’s work on 16mm, experiencing the 35mm projection in Broadway Cinematheque, or witnessing Choy Ka Fai’s lecture performance exploring live and virtual avatars in person.
As we traverse from 1900 to 2025 in this year’s programme, we explore the ongoing intersections between performance-making and moving images across different formats and time. In this new era dominated by AI and virtuality, I find myself drawn more urgently to the visceral nature of human connections—the spiritual encounters, the liveness of shared experience as well as the physicality of the medium itself. I shared the German director’s insistence—some things are worth being present for. This is the essence of Jumping Frames Time Machine 2025.
Looking forward to seeing you.
Curator, Elysa Wendi
