Curated List

Seeing the Nonhuman: The Gaze of Animals, Objects, and Ghosts

CathayPlay 8 films

When we grow used to understanding the world from a human position, many subtle yet persistent forms of existence fall outside our field of vision. This program turns the camera toward dogs, abandoned spaces, plants, mythical creatures, machines, objects, and natural elements, allowing them to occupy the center of the narrative and reframe how we think about perception, memory, and reality.

What these films explore is not only the nonhuman itself, but also how human life is revealed through nonhuman gazes: ruins echo back, plants find a voice, rails and metal leave a tactile trace, and wind, water, and light sketch out another order in the dark. Through these works, we hope to loosen habitual ways of seeing and let the world appear both larger and stranger.

Films in This Program

A Dog Under Bridge
The director imagines himself inside a dog’s body, using a canine viewpoint to re-examine the ordinary scenes humans have grown used to. Familiar urban life suddenly takes on an uncanny, ground-level strangeness.
Parkland of Decay and Fantasy
An abandoned amusement park is no longer just a ruin, but a signal tower receiving obsessions and echoes. Space itself begins to speak, resonating subtly with the people who still live around it.
Arbors, Herbs and Banana Leaves
The film lets plants step out of the background and become the true subject of narration. Through the experiment of plant music, it opens a world of vegetation beyond the human one.
Kelpie

Kelpie

2023

The mythical Kelpie seeps into reality like a crack, entangling illness, desire, and fear. The film brings supernatural imagery close to contemporary psychic experience, producing a dense and uneasy sense of reality.
The Iron Ministry
The friction between rails, metal, and flesh becomes an almost tactile experience. The film turns the railway into a vast machine-life form, while also capturing human anxiety and instability amid technological change.
Fallen Day
In the movement of 16mm film, the body is no longer simply a body, but a counterpoint between image, sound, and gesture. The film turns falling into both a way of seeing and a way of being.
Feathers, a Coin, and the Organ
An organ, a coin, and a feather drift through Langzhong as human presence is reduced to a minimum. The film feels like listening to objects whisper to one another, and watching a world with very little human center.
The Breeze
Wind, water, light, and night build an almost invisible world together. Sound beyond the frame and details hidden in darkness gradually trace the outlines of things.