Life
Shared life, intimacy, conflict, care and sustained pressure form the first material.
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Human Surrender Faction
A film grown from a lived collective
2023–2024
- Year
- 2023–2024
- Medium
- Moving-image theatre, documentary, performance and spatial narrative, approx. 156 min
- Role
- Director / Artist
The film grew from years of shared life, rehearsal and filming inside P4. Participants, director and camera all remain inside those relations.
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Project statement
Human Surrender Faction emerged from lived relations and collective production inside P4 Theatre. Spectatorship, rehearsal, role-play, intimacy, control and breakdown enter the film, while the presence of the camera changes distance and speech among the participants.
Moving between an abandoned factory, a bookstore, private rooms and theatrical situations, the work refuses a clean division between life and performance. Participants play roles while exposing themselves; the director organizes the structure while being implicated in it. The film remains both a residue of a collective and an ongoing inquiry into the ethics of looking.
After completing the film, He Fa continued to work with its voices, dialogue, breath, images and excerpts through a sound library, Logic sessions, explanatory shorts and frame-by-frame notes.
FOUR STAGES OF THE FILM
How a film formed through shared life
Human Surrender Faction grew from years of shared life, rehearsal and filming inside P4. The camera entered those relations, editing brought different times together, and the completed film later became a source for new sound work, short films and writing.
Rehearsal
Roles, tasks, space and the director’s position alter how people live and speak together.
Film
Camera and editing organize different times, sites and relations into an approximately 156-minute film.
Sound
Dialogue, breath, ambient sound and images from the film continue through sound libraries, shorts and writing.
TRAILER EXCERPT / 00:00:40–00:00:58
FILM / SOUND
Sound work after the completed film
HS4G Music Library gathers vocal timbre, dialogue, breath, ambient sound and sonic traces from the white-cloth sequence. The excerpt below comes from several rewrites of one line of lived dialogue.
HS4G / LOGIC PRO
Do You Need Me to Say It for You? — sound rewrite excerpt
00:00 / 00:45
PROJECT NOTES
Human Surrender Faction records shared life inside P4 and the changes caused by bringing a camera into those relations.
The film’s deeper structure lies less in plot than in friction among positions of looking: participants watch themselves, the director watches participants, the camera changes their actions, and editing makes ended relations happen again.
Beginning with long-term relations
The people in the film had already lived, rehearsed and worked together for years. Conflict, care and their effects on one another all preceded the film.
The camera enters the relation
The camera changes speech, bodily distance and the distribution of power. Documentary, action and role-play occupy the same image layer without offering a stable version of reality.
The director is exposed as well
The director’s organization, control, hesitation and failure remain in the film. Viewers can see how relations are arranged and when those arrangements fail.
WORKING PROCESS
Accumulate relations
Identify questions within lived archives and real conflicts.
Construct situations
Use site, task and role rules to intensify relations.
Permit breakdown
Keep deviations from the plan as moments when the structure becomes visible.
Continue the work
Continue working with sound, film frames, short films and writing drawn from the completed film.
PROJECT DETAILS
A line through the work
When life, performance and camera can no longer be separated, who surrenders—and who still controls the position of looking?
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P4 Theatre
Relations shaped through different sites