Filmmaker and visual artist Yeo Siew Hua harnesses the moving image in imaginative and empathetic ways to speculate upon possibilities of human transformation. Graduating with a film and media studies diploma, he then studied philosophy at the National University of Singapore. In his ambitious films and videos Yeo navigates subjects as diverse as the migrant experience in Singapore; the ancient, animistic beliefs of Southeast Asia; and industrial animal husbandry in his adoptive country of Argentina. For his bold cinematic explorations, Yeo was awarded the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard in 2018 for his film “A Land Imagined (2018)”.

In An Invocation to the Earth (2020), Yeo revives and inverts the Malay folktale of Sang Kancil, a wily mouse-deer who deftly outsmarts its foes, and intertwines this underdog fable with the region’s environmental politics. In the film, Kancil appears in human form. Wearing an animal mask, she carries her mortal enemy Buaya (crocodile) through the rainforest on her back. In contrast to the traditional narrative, Buaya then takes long-overdue, fatal revenge upon Kancil. Next a forest fire reanimates the mouse-deer and unites the two protagonists as they face this existential threat. They remove their masks and embrace. It is now Buaya’s turn to carry her adversary. As they retreat, the blackened forest slowly lights up with the facial-recognition grids of surveillance technology, like stars in the night. Each constellation, however, represents the faces, names, and years of death of fallen ecological defenders from the Philippines, where such activists are murdered with impunity.

Yeo’s video was shot during the Hungry Ghost Festival, when people of Chinese origin traditionally pay homage to their ancestors and burn paper effigies of money and material goods. The inferno in the film also references another kind of fire: Southeast Asia’s transboundary haze, caused by the large-scale burning of peatland in Sumatra and Borneo to clear and, it is believed, fertilize the soil. The tension between old and new practices and between mythical and scientific worldviews permeate Yeo’s practice. An Invocation to the Earth is a portal into a dimension where time, space, and individual identities collapse, transporting viewers toward a collective humanity.