CARGO and Short Interview with Laura Waddington

By Ki Wong

Translated from the Chinese

This article was originally published in a mixture of Chinese and English, with Ki Wong’s text in Chinese, and Laura Waddington’s answer to the unprinted questions that he posed in English.

CARGO (25 mins, 2001, Digibeta)

She was the only young woman on a large ship full of Romanian and Filipino sailors bound for the Middle East. During the six weeks on board, even when the ship docked at various ports along the way, the crew were not allowed to disembark. They had no choice but to play cards, sing, or tell stories to pass the time, their existence monotonous and constrained.

At times, she secretly captured moments from the sailors’ lives: a man stealing wood on the dock, a sailor fishing from an abandoned pier, a seaman begging the captain to take him back home. The entire film is blurred, slowed down, or in freeze-frame, offering a poetic depiction of the journey. The young woman recounts her feelings and the stories that she hears and observes, allowing the audience to drift between reality and inner world.

The uncertain and forgotten lives of the crew create a sense of yearning for the peace and stability of life on land. She had always imagined that life at sea meant freedom, but when she found herself surrounded by cargo and huge shipping containers, she realised that she hadn’t really visited anywhere at all. This was a journey without a destination.

Through the young woman’s eyes, we watch a group of people living a monotonous life in turbulent surroundings. The camera shakes, moves slowly, and its effects blur the rhythm of the action. The images stutter and trail off, making it difficult to tell if things are happening quickly or slowly. Calm and understated, even the most intense scenes seem insignificant: the furtiveness of a theft no different from the leisurely fishing or the singing and dancing, all just moments captured by the lens. The depiction of the crew’s life reveals the director’s bewilderment, as if the actors were supporting characters—the true protagonist, the one holding the camera, hidden behind the screen.

^LW For the last few years, I have been filming with a small DV camera. I love the freedom that this camera gives me to work alone. In my films, I am trying just to look at the world in a simple way. When I am shooting, I film instinctively, going towards the things that touch me without thinking too much about what the final form of the film will be. The people I film are often living in a situation on the edge of things – the sailors on a cargo ship in Cargo or the Iraqi and Afghan refugees secretly crossing Europe, whom I am presently filming for my film Border. During the shoot, I live in a nomadic way often not knowing in which country I will be the next week or what I will find. Often, I build up very intense bonds with people who I will probably never see again. I think it is a huge privilege to make films in this way. I feel I get to meet so many people and discover the world from a different point of view. I do not think much about the length of the film I am making. Cargo was a short film and Border will probably be long. I believe each film has its own length and that you cannot impose a length on it. The advantage of making short films is that since they cost less, producers are more open to experimentation. When I go to short film festivals, I am often amazed by the large variety of films from so many different places.

(With thanks to Suky Gu for co-ordinating the English translation.)

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