Double Bill: Morning Circle (2025) | Hair, Paper, Water... (2025)

Morning Circle (2025) Basma al-Sharif | Canada, UAE | 2025 | 21 min | PG For the displaced, even the smallest gestures of care and intimacy are suffused with the regulating force of colonial pedagogy. As a father prepares his son for school, bureaucratic processes and private rituals converge. Each echoes the same demand to conform, with the final familial and community separation being formalised by the gentle yet subtly regimented rituals of kindergarten education. Within the framework of a residency interview but crystallised in the seemingly ordinary domestic rituals of a father and son, the idea of the model assimilated immigrant is reproduced, revealing the ways in which state regulation infiltrates daily life. In its brevity, the film is less a narrative than a critique of how migrant lives and diasporic memory are disciplined into citizenship, and the quiet violence of being taught how to belong. Hair, Paper, Water... (2025) Trương Minh Quý, Nicolas Graux / Belgium, France, Vietnam / 2025 / 71 min / PG / Singapore Premiere A home movie like no other, ensconced in the tradition of silent film, and a poetically pedagogical archive of a vanishing community. Returning to a central figure in his earlier film The Tree House (2019), Trương Minh Quý and his collaborator Nicolas Graux release a lyrical ebb and flow of images that carry Cao Thị Hậu back to the womb-like cavern of her birthplace and of the minority Rục people. This contemplative documentary floats through Hậu’s meditations into a syllabus of ancestral knowledge in the spirit of oral tradition. The filmmakers’ loose assembly of images, paired with intertitles that coalesce into a vocabulary of an endangered language, recalls silent cinema. With the cranking of a Bolex camera onto 16mm film, memories of the Rục’s vanishing culture stream into us, if only for a moment, yet long enough to ripple within our consciousness.