Yuanqinghe Peng

In-betweener(2025) tried to create a creature (named The Thing) as a replacement for an ever-changing mental subject. In this process, the subject is constantly being gently lifted and heavily put down.In the space they inhabit, a world is taking shape, a shelter for in-between forms of existence.These are not narrative tools, but gestures in the Agamben sense residues of an embodied process.I intentionally maintain a certain ambiguity and a sense of distance from my film. In-betweener was to establish a gap within narrative ambiguity that can invite space to become. It is a liminal space that seems to be inhabited by two performers, and these spaces guide something to happen naturally, through actions and dialogue, rather than in a traditional way.

On the other hand, In In-betweener(2025), I chose not to translate the characters’ dialogue conventionally, as The Thing being an ocean creature rather than a human, calls for translation as performance. The audience is invited to receive the film from a non-human perspective, inhabiting a space in between comprehension and incomprehension—a semantic gap. This semantic gap responds to  my exploration of the concept of translation through this unconventional approach.

This film was shot at Dungeness, a beach near Derek Jraman’s garden. The site, at once real and illusory. I set my filming location there. But in the end, I found that this beach looked no different from any other beach in the world. My dreamscape had transformed into a more realistic world, an unspeakable material turned into film, endlessly interpreted. My memory of that beach(together with the memory of watching the Blue(1993)) made it visible and common. Such space reminds me a feminine aesthetic—one that is open to giving, to understanding, to allowing space for interpretation. When gazing at images through the camera, I feel as though The Thing’s body is like a multi-story building, and certain still and slow-moving images are like winds passing through the spaces between the floors.