Modern Mondays welcomes artist and filmmaker Daphne Xu to present the US premiere of her newest short film, Notes of a Crocodile (2024), which screens alongside previous works. Xu’s exploration of the politics and poetics of place draws on her background in urban planning; her earliest projects pertain to Xiongan, a rural area in China’s Hebei province designated for development into a megacity. Xu’s films are keenly attuned to the movement of bodies in liminal spaces, from the local residents and migrant workers who punctuate A Thousand-Year Stage (2020) with dances performed at rapidly shifting sites in Xiongan, to the nocturnal souls who gather around New York City’s Seward Park in the gently observed ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong (2024).
Notes of a Crocodile (2024) follows an unnamed protagonist across Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in search of a missing friend, another Chinese woman. Shot over a matter of days, the film’s loose, intuitive texture captures the heightened sensations of transiting through a foreign space, where the alienation of the bustling city can give way to startling encounters, not least with the titular reptile. Borrowing its title from the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin’s cult queer novel, Xu’s film is not a literary adaptation as much as a kindred excavation of dislocation and desire. Borrowing from Qiu’s nonlinear literary structure, Notes of a Crocodile is a meditation on longing that expands outward, reflecting more broadly the queerness of being in an othered body, in a state of in-between.
The screening is followed by a conversation with the artist, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.