01 / 07

Human Surrender Faction

A film grown from a lived collective

2023–2024

Year: 2023–2024
Medium: Moving-image theatre, documentary, performance and spatial narrative, approx. 156 min
Role: Director / Artist

Rather than beginning with a fixed screenplay, the film carries collective life, rehearsal, intimacy, directorial power and loss of control into the image.

Project statement

Human Surrender Faction is a convergence point in He Fa’s long-term practice. Emerging from lived relations and collective production inside P4 Theatre, it brings spectatorship, rehearsal, role-play, intimacy, control and breakdown into a cinematic structure. The camera is not a neutral witness; it actively changes the relations it records.

Moving between an abandoned factory, a bookstore, private rooms and theatrical situations, the work refuses a clean division between life and performance. Participants play roles while exposing themselves; the director organizes the structure while being implicated in it. The film remains both a residue of a collective and an ongoing inquiry into the ethics of looking.

After the film, the project continues through a sound library, Logic sessions, explanatory shorts, frame-level analysis and AI moving-image experiments. Cinema becomes not an endpoint but a generative matrix for sound, text, data and further images.

FILM ANATOMY

From lived situation to film—and then to afterimage

Human Surrender Faction was not completed in a single act. Relations first emerged through shared life and P4 situations, were altered and fixed by the camera, and continued after the film as sound, text, short video, analysis and AI moving image.

Life

Shared life, intimacy, conflict, care and sustained pressure form the first material.

Theatre

Rehearsal, roles, live rules and the director’s position reorganize life as a relation that can be watched.

Cinema

The camera intervenes; editing collides different times and positions into a 156-minute structure.

Afterimage

Sound libraries, Logic sessions, frame analysis, explanatory shorts and generated images let the film proliferate.

TRAILER EXCERPT / 00:00:40–00:00:58

POST-CINEMA / SOUND

Once the film was finished, the real post-production began.

HS4G Music Library is not a conventional scoring folder. It is a working system for translating vocal timbre, dialogue, breath, the white-cloth motif and emotional residue back into sound. This excerpt comes from several rewrites of one lived line of dialogue.

HS4G / LOGIC PRO

Do You Need Me to Say It for You? — sound rewrite excerpt

00:00 / 00:45

PROJECT RESEARCH LAYER

This is not a record of a collective, but an experiment in how the camera changes one.

The film’s deeper structure lies less in plot than in friction among positions of looking: participants watch themselves, the director watches participants, the camera changes their actions, and editing makes ended relations happen again.

01 / Context

Beginning with long-term relations

The material comes from years of shared life, rehearsal, collaboration, conflict and care within P4. The people are not temporary cast members assembled for a film, but relational subjects who have already altered one another.

02 / Mechanism

The camera is not an observer

The camera changes speech, bodily distance and the distribution of power. Documentary, action and role-play occupy the same image layer without offering a stable version of reality.

03 / Consequence

The director is exposed as well

The film does not hide directorial power outside the frame. Organization, control, hesitation and failure remain in the structure, making the ethics of looking an actual condition rather than merely a theme.

WORKING SEQUENCE