Notes of a Crocodile, Notes of a Crocodile

A Chinese woman searches across Cambodia for her ex-lover, who has disappeared mysteriously. She travels from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, along the proposed route of the Funan Techo Canal, using the symbology of their relationship to unravel clues. The country waits apprehensively for construction to begin on the massive Belt and Road funded waterway that will displace thousands.

“My friend was 26 when she left China. She told me she wanted to be eaten by a crocodile. To die in a mythic way, like the Cambodian princess who was consumed by her lover. If she couldn’t make it out alive, that’s the way she wanted to go. Carried south by the Mekong River, out of China forever.”

The crocodile itself is a mythic, unknowable figure in the story of the film. It is symbolic, signifying the primordial, the Earth, and all aberrant sexualities. It is also an animal existing in real economic and ecological material conditions in Cambodia. The main character seeks her ex-lover who has disappeared in Cambodia and has written to her about encountering crocodiles. The film explores agony and ecstasy within cycles of grief, and the haptics of illegibility in a queerness that arrives from sensuality and touch between unlikely forms. The film is inspired by the novel Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin. Deemed a cult classic, the book helped coin Lala, the term for lesbian in Chinese. The film is not an adaptation of the novel, but I am inspired by its form and effect. The book consists of fragmented diary entries and depicts a crocodile as a repressed queer individual who must put on a “human suit” to fit into society. In the film, I will create a choreography between the local and the foreign, and between the movement of women along the river. The film comments on the current China’s presence in Cambodia in Cambodia and the ongoing violence of hydropolitics, where dams and canals alter floodplains, habitats, and livelihoods beyond the borders of nation-states.