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:
The primary title, "fuu" is short for ‘faith under uncertainty”. For about a year now, I've been sitting with this quiet feeling of surrender. There's something about leaving the faith or surrenderance unnamed that feels right to me, and the moment I changed it into an abbreviation, I knew that was the title I wanted.
Late last year, while traveling home to Jakarta, I noticed quotes painted on walls and started collecting them. It became a habit; Seoul, Seattle, little quiet corners of European alleyways. I think I loved them because I wanted graffiti to be a staple in my own films, the way La Haine iconized "Le monde est à nous."
By the time I sat down to make this short film, I had a collection to pull from.
The quotes I chose for “fuu / duality” were the ones that felt closest to that feeling. I recently realized that some of them are passages from the Islamic holy book. I wasn't aware of this when I included them, and it was purely coincidental.
To close the piece, I ended on a quote from an Indonesian poet, Chairil Anwar, and his poem "Aku", which means I or me in English. 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. References, things I felt were essential to the vision. We talked through what else we could bring in for a whole week. She mentioned to me that she was working on a lamp for her semester final, being a Product Design major. Her work was metallic, rusted, and mechanical. Then there was Hayul, whom I had always seen as a “softer” person. That contrast was too interesting to ignore, and the idea of ‘duality’ began to take shape.
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 her 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 in the city.
Everything was in conversation with its other half.
I chose to shoot this on 16mm, my first time working with the format. It was scary. I was overthinking that I had overexposed the film, and I was scared the whole thing was going to fall apart.
The medium was going through exactly what I was trying to express.
So I gave up and surrendered to it, trusting that the footage would come out, and articulated my expression into the art. It felt poetic in a way I didn't fully plan for.
I'm incredibly pleased with how the film came together. It reflects everything I set out to say.
Shooting 16mm for the first time and coming out the other side with something I am very proud of has made me want to keep going with the format. There is definitely more dreamy celluloid work to come, and always, bigger, more ambitious projects on the way :)
Special thanks to the inspirations that helped shape fuu / duality:
The places I traveled to these past few months, Seoul, Jakarta, Paris, Barcelona, and everything they left in me. Hayul Park, Trevon, and most importantly, my family, friends, and mentors.