In Her Time (Iris’s Version)

In Her Time (Iris’s Version) is the story of Iris, an actress rehearsing for the leading role in a historical war film about the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, a brutal attack by the Imperial Japanese Army on Chinese civilians during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). The director Diane Severin Nguyen uses this historical context to explore how history seeps into the present, primarily through the media but also in the form of memory, reconstruction, or even fan fiction. The doubling back and collapsing of time is furthered by Iris’s version, which includes the actress’s retrospective commentary on the making of In Her Time alongside her own private iPhone footage.

Nguyen shot much of the film at Hengdian World Studios, one of the largest film studios in the world, which has also become a destination for filmmakers and tourists alike to experience a sweeping nationalist history of China. Nguyen features some of the thousands of migrant workers who come to Hengdian each year with hopes of screentime and end up as extras portraying Japanese soldiers or civilian casualties. Over the course of Nguyen’s film, fiction and reality fuse as she explores the limits of the ways history is told and uses reenactment as a vehicle for visualizing the future. 

Free admission with your ticket to The Impermanent. Ticket to the film available only at the cinema box office.