Eyes Wide Open (trailer)

This film is a compilation of a hip-hop artist's 4 paparazzi encounters. We hear the sound of Kharis being bathed in light and see the moment of him being seen. The film practices different techniques and explores the importance of HYPERVISIBILITY in fashion films through presenting hip-hop culture from a spectator’s point of view. Each of the 4 encounters practices a different technique in filmmaking to emphasize hypervisibility to heighten the audience’s awareness of the act of looking. Narrative-wise, the film focuses on the hip-hop culture because hyper-visibility is also the core of its visual culture. Expressions of visuality in hip-hop place an emphasis on the moment of being made into a representation and its optical effects. In addition to Kharis’ conversations with the paparazzi, the shimmering skin, the “BLING”, the flashing lights, etc., all convey the state between hyper-visibility and blinding invisibility.

Hilda (Huayi) Xu

Hilda is a filmmaker based in London, Toronto, and Hangzhou, who directs and edits all kinds of creative moving images and audiovisual content. Drawn by different moving image media works from different eras, she explores ways to incite visual curiosity, supply visual pleasure, and blur and break formats and boundaries between various media through her works. Her works deliberately attract the audience's attention and acknowledge their spectatorship as Hilda believes that messages can be visually communicated the most effectively when the audience is actively engaged in the act of looking which is only enabled by intriguing and exhilarating images.