The Cinematheque

In Person: Lily Jue Sheng

“My films have strong animist sensibilities, but I want to talk about it like a historical materialist.”

Lily Jue Sheng

“very abstract and a little bit harsh” traces the political consciousness of Lily Jue Sheng’s practice through a decade of their experience around unstable cinema economies. The making of Sheng’s Force Majeure coincided with a period of optical printing and their occupation as a small-gauge technician cataloguing late filmmaker and projectionist Stom Sogo’s life work. His untimely passing in 2012 tasked Sheng with handling Sogo’s queer and seminal diary films, which heavily influenced their early artistic process. For the first time, Sheng’s work is screening alongside Sogo’s Slow Death, in a timely combination that speaks to the psychic effects of technology, youth, and capitalist violence. Heritage Architecture marks Sheng’s shift to landscape cinema following a period of labour organizing. The program will be accompanied by a reading from their upcoming chapbook Wage Theft, a mix of poetic and agitprop thinking that draws from class struggles across various fronts and fissures, followed by a Q&A. —Steff Huì Cí Ling

Force Majeure
USA 2015–2017
Lily Jue Sheng
5 min. 16mm

Mercurial Matter
USA 2014–2017
Lily Jue Sheng
6 min. 16mm

Change 变
USA 2016–2017
Lily Jue Sheng
6 min. Digital

Heritage Architecture
建筑遗产
China/​Taiwan/​USA 2024
Lily Jue Sheng
9 min. Digital

Slow Death
USA 2000
Stom Sogo
15 min. Digital

“[A] movie’s reality should be as nasty and fucked up as possible, so we want to get the fuck out of the theatre and hope for something better in life.”

Stom Sogo