Inner Frequencies: On the Pathways Home from LA to Beijing

Hosted and produced by Mathew Gene and Hannah Polinski.

Top half: Still from I DON’T FEEL AT HOME ANYWHERE ANYMORE (2021), Bottom half: Still from POST OFFICE (2021)

This conversation is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative III, a collaborative mentorship incubator between the 25th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.

A full transcript of the conversation can be found **here.**

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Is home a place? A feeling? Or a collective story we’ve tacitly accepted through our constructed sense of culture? If lost, how do we go home?

In this conversation, Youth Critics Mathew Gene and Hannah Polinski explore narratives surrounding home in this hour-long conversation from Mathew’s Toronto apartment. Miscommunication and notions of belonging are echoed in their discussion and contrasting reviews of Viv Li’s I DON’T FEEL AT HOME ANYWHERE ANYMORE, and Courtney Loo & David Karp’s POST OFFICE, two short films from the 25th edition of Reel Asian. The conversation floats from their favourite films to each movie’s respective locations from Los Angeles to Beijing, tracing cinematic geographies that lead them somewhere foreign yet familiar.

The video delves into Mathew and Hannah’s inner spaces, showing the places in which each of their interior worlds collide as they create personal meaning from their surrounding environments. It’s not the type of visual journey that has a particular beginning and endpoint, although you are more than welcome to follow their paths from start to finish. Think of it as the fireplace channel of visual podcasts; something that plays as you listen and cook dinner, make crafts or knead bread. Or see it as a visual radio frequency directly tuned into the inner landscape of Mathew and Hannah, whatever that may mean.

Hannah Polinski is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Southern Ontario. Approaching her subjects through the passage of time, her work explores familial memory, shifting landscapes, and the surreal. She can be found at her nearest bakery, or less commonly at hannahpolinski.com. Hannah’s IG @wallcreeping

Mathew is an emerging multidisciplinary artist producing works in creative writing, photography, music production, and film. He recently graduated with a masters degree in Cell & Systems Biology from the University of Toronto and now starting his new adventures in the film industry and creative spaces. For Mathew, the limit of science ends at that which is material. It cannot inform us how to live out our lives. So he turns to the transformative power of cinema, to learn, reconsider, and explore the nature of the world we live in.

mathewgene.com IG: @mathewyen dj ginohino’s untitled radio project (Youtube) ginohino (Letterboxd) https://mathewgene.substack.com/