Lion in the Wind
2023, 4:50 minutes
single-channel digital video with sound
35mm film emulsion, nail polish, tape, 16mm film leader

A fugue for forgetting windmills in the West.

This cameraless “emulsion lift” film was made from a discarded 35mm reel of a Hong Kong martial arts western featuring Jet Li as a kung fu master who loses his memory and fights bandits and windmills as he makes his journey to Chinatown.

Description from Chicago Underground Film Festival:
“A martial arts western is torn apart and reassembled into a hallucinatory fugue. Using emulsion lift techniques on discarded 35mm footage of Jet Li battling windmills and amnesia, this cameraless film becomes a meditation on memory, migration, and martial myth. Lion in the Wind conjures a fractured, ghostly Chinatown where identity is unstuck and images drift like desert dust.”

Screenings
Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2025
“Reckonings in Film: TT Takemoto and Genevieve Quick,” Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, 2024
Drunken Film Festival Oakland, October 2024
Cine Pobre Film Festival, San Mateo Rio Hondo, Oaxaca, August 2024
Denver Underground Film Festival, May 2024
In the Palace International Short Film Festival, Pernik, Bulgaria, 2024
CAAMfest, San Francisco, May 18, 2024
Canyon Cinema “Spotlight on TT Takemoto,” 500 Capp St, San Francisco, 2024
Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago, 2024
Houston Cinema Arts Festival, 2023
Bay Area Now 9 Film Series, “Canyon Cinema: Contemporary Bay Area Film,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2023