Screening Rights 2024: The Undesirables + Three Borders

The closing night of Screening Rights’ 10th-anniversary edition, subtitled Double Bill and aimed at fostering South-to-South solidarity, features The Undesirables, Hester Yang’s short about the Chinese Liverpudlians, alongside Three Borders - Alisa Berger’s mid-length essay about the Soviet Koreans.

Hester Yang’s short film The Undesirables unpacks the traumatic and long-classified history of the Chinese men who were working as dockers in Liverpool during World War II. When the war ended, they were deemed no longer necessary and deported to China overnight, leaving behind families and children they had fathered in Liverpool. The film organically combines extensive archival work and interviews with the descendants of the sailors, conducted by Yang in Liverpool.

In her hypnotic, labyrinthine mid-length film essay Three Borders, Alisa Berger, a Germany-based filmmaker of Korean and Jewish descent, tackles her intricate family history that spans multiple countries. Berger recounts the story of her mother, Tatjana, who is a Koryo-saram person — a Soviet Korean. Realised in monochrome and subdued colours, and utilising material archives and oral testimonies, Three Borders highlights the plurality of diasporic experiences and the suppressed narratives of racialised displacement in the USSR.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion, featuring guest curators Misha Zakharov, Fangyuan Zhao and Qinghan Chen, and filmmakers Hester Yang and Alisa Berger.