Us and the Night.

Audrey Lam’s debut feature film, Us and the Night, will have its Australian premiere at Melbourne International Film Festival next week. These screenings follow the film’s world premiere at New York film festival Prismatic Ground in May this year.

Ten years in the making and shot on 16mm film, Us and the Night follows two travellers crossing paths at a university library. Umi (Umi Ishihara) is a night shelver, while Xiao (Xiao Deng) works as a library cleaner. Like ships passing in the night, the library—with its symmetry, rhythms and recurrences—form a fantastic geography for their stories and adventures.

Audrey is one of four Australian filmmakers nominated for the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award, which recognises an outstanding Australian creative within a film playing in the MIFF program. Read Audrey’s statement for the award here.

“I liked thinking about how a new language can be an invitation and a game; how reading steps us into the familiar and the unknown; and how libraries can be like fantastic, exhilarating adventures to the sea, into the universe, to anywhere else. Stories and accounts are part of what the film is about. I hope the viewer—a reader, of sorts—will find other things too” says filmmaker Audrey Lam. “I filmed and edited the film myself over the years. Xiao is a jeweller who has been in my short films before and Umi is a filmmaker too; neither are actors. I started filming them at the library ten years ago and returned to keep filming the library over the years. It’s a place I used to work at twenty years ago. The time spent and the time passing became part of the film.”

Audrey Lam is a filmmaker. Her films have been widely screened, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Visions du Réel, Austrian Film Museum and Asia-Pacific Triennial. She is an alumnus of Locarno Filmmakers Academy, MIFF Accelerator Lab, Adelaide Film Festival Hive Lab, Asialink Arts and Fondazione Antonio Ratti Advanced Course. Audrey has co-curated film programs at the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. She is a member of Artist Film Workshop and a Studio Program resident at City of Melbourne’s Meat Market.

Us and the Night will screen at MIFF from August 12 – August 25. Details here. 

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