fuu / duality
fuu / duality is an experimental 16mm short, something I like to call a visual meditation. It's built around quotes that found me over the past year, strung together to describe a feeling I haven't been able to shake. This is my first ever 16mm project.
The film is a portrait of a friend. Specifically her duality, the way she carries her feminine and masculine side within the same person.
Selected Shots
May 2026
Behind The Work:
“fuu” is an abbreviation. I'll leave it at that. Something about the way the text looks felt funny to me, and the moment I wrote it down I knew that was the title. I've been sitting with this feeling for about a year now, and the closest word I have for it is “surrendering”. I hope when you watch it, you feel something close to that, or at least something of your own.
Around the end of last year, travelling back home to Jakarta, I started noticing quotes on graffiti walls and saving them into my notes app. That became a habit. Seoul, Barcelona, corners of the internet at 2am.
By the time I sat down to make this film, I had a collection to pull from.
The quotes I chose for “fuu” were the ones that felt closest to that feeling.
To close the piece, I ended on a quote from Chairil Anwar's poem "Aku", in English “I.” Something about it felt final in the best way. It was about the self, and it was exactly what the film needed to land on.
When I reached out to my friend, Hayul, about the project, I sent her a set of images I had been collecting also. References, things I felt were essential to the vision. We talked through what else we could bring in. She mentioned she was working on a lamp for her semester final, being a product design major. Her work was metallic, rusted, mechanical. And then there was Hayul herself, who I had always seen as a “soft” person. That contrast was too interesting to ignore, and the idea of duality started to take shape from there.
The film moves between images of her in a flamboyant skirt, doing quiet and intimate things, and images of her work and the process of building the lamp.
The sound design followed the same logic. Leaves crunching, birds, soft textures alongside the distant wail of ambulances and the whirring of metal and wood shop equipment.
Everything was in conversation with its other half.
I chose to shoot this on 16mm, my first time working with the format. It was terrifying. I was scared I had overexposed the film, scared the whole thing was going to fall apart. But that fear was almost the point.
The medium was going through exactly what I was trying to express.
I was surrendering to it, trusting that the footage would come out, hoping for the best.It felt poetic in a way I didn't fully plan for.
I'm really happy with how the film turned out.
Shooting 16mm for the first time and coming out the other side with something I'm proud of has made me want to keep going with the format.
There is definitely more to come, and bigger, more ambitious projects on the way :)
Special thanks to the inspirations that helped shape fuu / duality:
Hayul + the places I traveled to these past few months, Seoul, Jakarta, Paris, Barcelona, and everything they left in me. To my family, friends, and mentors.