Speaking Otherwise: Migration, Labour and Collaborative practice

Event schedule:

18:00 | Screening programme - 60min

10min break

19:20 | Talk + open discussion - 60 - 80min

Date: Fri 7th Nov 2025

Venue: MayDay Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1DH

The event begins with a screening programme that brings two documentary works into dialogue. Swimming in Mine Pit Lake (2022) traces the absences left in the director’s family as young men left Malaysia for undocumented work abroad in the 1980s. While Ate’s Holiday (2022) documents the lives of Filipino workers in Macau, whose separation from their families is negotiated through improvised networks of care and collective intimacy.

Followed by a talk with artists and community workers who develop practices in close collaboration with migrant communities.

Speakers will share a range of projects: from translation and community archive works with the Vietnamese diaspora; to migrant rights adovacacy and oral history initiatives with Filipino workers; and artistic interventions that explore alternative temporalities in migrant life.

Rather than speaking about migrants from the outside, the event asks what it means to make work with and alongside them. It considers how such socially engaged practices can bear witness to the lived realities of labour and displacement, while creating spaces for solidarity and collective imagination.

Film programme:

Swimming in Mine Pit Lake 跳飞机

Dir. Lee Chie Yen | Taiwan | 2022 | 23min

In 1980s Perak, Malaysia, the collapse of the tin mining industry left few local opportunities, prompting many young men to leave home for undocumented work abroad, a phenomenon known as tiao feiji (跳飞机).

Director Chie Yen picks up a camera to trace the quiet absences left behind in her family, and considers how these departures shaped the coming-of-age of those who remained.

Ate’s Holiday 阿姐的假期

Dir. Chan Teng Teng | Macau | 2022 | 37min

Filmed over the course of a year with a community of Filipino migrant workers in Macau, the film traces how, when the pandemic foreclosed the annual ritual of returning home for Christmas, collective life was reconstituted through improvised forms of festivity.

From congregational singing in a tenement church to sing, meals shared around crowded tables, to video calls that stitch the distance of familial separation, these gestures illuminate an alternative sociality — one sustained through resilience, care, and kinship beyond the frame of labour.

Speakers:

01

Jialu Shen is an artist and the founder of Shanzhai Workshop — an independent social design platform that explores how cities evolve amid social and cultural tensions through participatory filmmaking and community-based workshops.

She launched The Breakfast at Night project which asks how people connect when their lives run on different schedules. In Macao’s San Mei On community, migrant night-shift workers and local residents live side by side yet out of sync. The Breakfast Shop turns this dislocation into a shared ritual—eating breakfast at night as a way to explore time and coexistence.

Teng Wang is a curator, artist and architect based in London and Beijing. He explores art, curatorial practice as tools of critical engagement with space and society. His curatorial practice is rooted in the profound transformations shaping our cities and daily lives, including rapid urban renewal, political turbulence, and the shift toward dematerialization.

02

Phương Anh Nguyễn works with words, primarily in translation, with features on Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, PR&TA and in Here Was Once The Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Eco-Writing among others. In 2024, they participated in NCW Visible Communities virtual residency, exploring the space between memory, archive and translation. Phương Anh works part-time with Tilted Axis Press and volunteers with An Việt Archives and ESEA Community Centre's lunch club.

More on An Việt Archives : https://anvietarchives.org

03

Francesca Humi organises and writes on migration and border violence — rooted in her work in the Filipino migrant community. She organises with United Domestic Workers Association (formerly Filipino DWA), supporting their fundraising, political education, and creative work. She also leads Kanlungan’s participation in the Covid-19 Inquiry to ensure the experiences and views of Filipino migrants during the pandemic are heard.

Francesca is writing her first book, a feminist history of Filipino migration to Britain, drawing on oral history interviews with Filipino nurses, carers, domestic workers, and spouses.

Whose Homeland

The event is part of Whose Homeland presented by Sine Screen, a film season that explores migration, displacement and marginalised lives in East & Southeast Asia and the diaspora. The programme will be running until March 2026, with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding. Find Out More.

About Sine Screen

Sine Screen is a London-based screening collective dedicated to showcasing independent cinema and moving-image works from across East and Southeast Asia. It aims to create space for critical dialogue around dominant representations of ESEA cultures and histories through diverse programming.

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For any enquiries, email sinescreenuk@gmail.com