Yisong Tang

“Are all your memories of me like this?”

My dad asked me this after I had just bawled my eyes out — the type of cry that first numbs your ears, then shoulders, and then fingertips. The type I often have in front of this man, regardless of how hard I pinch myself or how often I tilt my head up so tears won’t fall down.

I made this film to answer that question.

All my work, in one form or another, is answering questions like the one above, to convey the basic human emotions I feel so I don’t have to feel them alone.

My process for achieving this goal has three steps. Visuals. Sounds. Improvisation.

The germination of my ideas is always visual, and always faces. I know what I want my film to make people feel before I know what my film is, and I do this through faces. What type of faces do I want? How close do I get to these faces? What emotions do I want these faces to express? I would know the answers before any plot or theme enters my mind. To emphasize the face in my works, I often use a wide-angle lens as it distorts how we see other humans. It is in that moment of uncertainty when we see another’s face look a little bit too round or a teeny bit too long that a spark of intimacy is generated.

Sound is what brings my ideas to life. It is always difficult for me to begin turning visuals into scripts without knowing what sounds I’m going to use because there is a rhythm to my films that I can’t quite actualize until I hear the right piece of music or noise. It is only when I've found a score for my piece, whether that be a song, a wind chime or a deep breath, that I can begin stringing together the visuals in my head into a cohesive story or theme.

At the end of my idea’s germination and at the beginning of it becoming something else lies improvisation. Since I work with live actors, I write my scripts in a manner that allows a certain degree of reshuffling and reinterpretation. I believe whatever my actor brings to the table, whether they be someone who has acted before or not, will be infinitely more complex than whatever I can fabricate in my mind. I want pieces of the humans behind the actors to shine through. This is what gives my films life, not the words I write down on a piece of paper beforehand.

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