The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing

Production country: 
sg
Year: 
2011
Duration: 
28 min
Edition: 
2013
Format: 
film/video
courtesy of Ho Tzu Nyen
courtesy of Ho Tzu Nyen

The Cloud of Unknowing is titled after a fourteenth century mystical treatise on faith, where the cloud is paradoxically a metaphor for both an impediment to, and reconciliation with, the unknown or the divine experience. Set in a deserted, low-income public housing block in Singapore, the film revolves around 8 characters in 8 apartments, each in the midst of an activity that brings them into an encounter with a cloud, that alternates between being embodied in a figure, and as a vaporous mist. In the moment of encounter, a shift, transformation or illumination occurs that, as the medieval text counsels, is effected in a direct experience of the senses, instead of being understood with the mind.

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