At the Aupuni Space installation this was presented quite elegantly alongside other films in the American Boyfriend series, and some small props: a photograph, Peace and Hope cigs in an ashtray. A lot of people actually stopped and wondered what was going on but never actually came inside or watched the film. It was the perfect environment to see this film in: bright and lonely, with ersby occasionally staring at you and a lot of glare reflecting off the screen.
It's instructive to compare the image of military planes flying in V formation in No Border with the birds that do the same in this film as they glide along the misty coast. George's films depict borders as richly populated and diverse ecologies. Human and non-human life become entangled, zones of sanitation and exclusion are presented as always already overgrown and infiltrated. When actions are mirrored between those two categories of life, the lie that renders migrants "animalistic" and civilians "civilized" breaks down. We are made to recognize that the world is co-created and shared by many irrepressible existences that can never be legislated into oblivion.
The struggle to place the shared experience of a queer life (together) between the spaces of a heteronormative routine. Its ending lies somewhere beyond hope or despair—it felt like I was seeing them slide into an acceptance of this asynchronous love, fractured by time and circumstance, and mended in equal capacity by the wordlessness of physical . On the one hand, an unsparing depiction of the day-to-day oppression that threatens to tear queer love apart, perhaps without end, and on the other hand, the affirmation that even despite this, queer love can and will persist.
For how minimalist it is, this movie packs a huge punch.
