Confessions of a Salesman

Filmmaker Ho Tam invites you to examine the role of Asian masculinity in media in a series of challenging montages fastidiously assembled from stock footage, film clips, newspaper clippings, “found” photos, and even home movies. Like many films in the experimental category, concepts are invoked without a definite intent for their meaning. A familiarity with the context is helpful in interpreting the piece, but it’s still difficult to know what decisions are informed by obscure knowledge, and which are totally proprietary. I found out from the Q&A a few of my assumptions about a montage were completely false, and I’d entirely missed the point: which is often the case, in my experience, with such films.

The squirm factor is high in screenings like this, though the process of watching them can sometimes be enlightening.

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