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Mila Xiong's Portfolio

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Work Sample 1 When I Look at You Experimental Documentary Excerpt · 1 min · 2024 When I Look at You began as a documentary about nightlife in China, featuring my friend Qiao Gui, then a dance and visual art student at Sarah Lawrence College. The more I filmed, the more the camera turned toward our friendship: how I came to be so close to her, and how I earned a VIP seat in her life. Shot in China in the summer of 2022 and in New York from that fall into early 2023, the film follows Qiao through my eyes, in a series of reflective scenes that hold the small moments of connection and understanding between us. It takes apart and reimagines the idea of intimacy, and invites the audience into that closeness. This page shows a 1:42 excerpt from the 15-minute film, my senior capstone at Lawrence University.   Work Sample 2 Shout Out to Ravers Nonfiction Event Film · 3 mins · Shot in 2021, Edited 2024 In 2021, I spent one night as the camerawoman at an underground club in Guangzhou, China,...
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Shout out to the Ravers

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I believe that people who typically like my movies are those who are very fond of nightclub culture and subcultures. Vibrant scenes and crowds brimming with hormones are the best catalysts for my films. Especially those who love raves, they really enjoy my movies because there is already a very strong sense of identity in them. Therefore, the reviews tend to be quite polarized: those who like it really love it, and those who don't like it, don't. Ravers immediately recognize, 'Oh, this is about our own culture,' when they see my films. However, people who aren't into nightclub culture might not be very interested in my movies. But my ultimate goal is to achieve a good balance, so that everyone can find such works with strong cultural identity interesting and appreciate them.
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When I Look at You

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Title:  When I Look At You Type of film: Experimental Documentary Name: Zhaomei Xiong (Mila) In my experimental documentary   When I Look At You , I aim to offer the audience a deeply personal and introspective exploration of the intimacy within my friendship with Qiao Gui. She is currently studying in Sarah Lawrence College as a Dance and Visual Art Major. Through a series of reflective views, I intend to provide viewers with a unique perspective, allowing them to see my friend through my eyes. I filmed all the footages over the summer in China, fall in 2022 and the beginning of 2023 in New York. Each scene is carefully crafted to convey the nuances of our relationship, highlighting the moments of connection, understanding, and shared experiences that define our bond. Initially envisioned as a documentary on nightlife in China featuring Qiao, the project evolved as I delved deeper into our friendship. The more I filmed, the more I reflected on our connection—how I came to be ...
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Final Project: Smiling Exercise

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For my Final Project, I was thinking of doing something like preforming arts. Something that I was inspired from my daily life, or something that I observed from myself, my own behaviors. I think twenty is a very awkward age for me, feeling like I'm saying and doing all the wrong things and looking stupid and out of place. I always think things will get better as I get a little older, I'll look forward to growing up, and I'll always wonder if I'm thirty or forty now, will I be unconcerned or comfortable with the predicament I'm in now at twenty? But I also won't know what I'll be thinking about in ten years or twenty years. I have always thought that emotional life is a very complicated topic for me, sometimes I think it is not important, and sometimes I think emotional life is important. What I mean by emotional life here is social, friendship, love, and family life. It is because I categorize them all as emotional life that this topic is simply huge for me...
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It's just a jam bruh

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It started when I stumbled into my friend's practice room and then it happened that he was working on something. So we started a little bit of our little jam. I think this little sample came about very by chance, but it was very relaxing and reminded me of my vacation time. https://soundcloud.com/xiongz-775950147/shlay-jam-1/s-aIfT1yahUKM?si=11a8a3eaadaf4e43941aed52fccd2895&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing  
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Physical

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💚💚💚  My initial thought was that I was often very unconfident about my own body, but my friends always encouraged me or complimented me, and when I said I was fat or ugly or unconfident about myself they would get very angry because they thought I shouldn't be so unaware of my beauty.  Sometimes this does not mean beauty in the secular sense, but when we look at ourselves we may not be able to recognize that we have a unique beauty, instead our unique beauty is always found by others. For example, you have always felt that a certain part of your body is just fine or even ugly, but one day you will find that someone around you likes this part of your body and give you compliments.  Then you may also slowly fall in love with this part of your body, and sometimes this works very well. Sometimes, you will also find that it takes a long time to find out your friends' special sense of beauty. They just seemingly blend in with the surrounding environment out of a sudden somed...
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Alice in Burping Land

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💚💚💚 💚💚💚 This is a short, rough, funny video about a princess who lives in a burping land and is looking for some good burps. And she meets a burping angel, and they have this series of stories that I'd like to turn into a whole show like I.B Area.  I also want to make the entire story dreamy or Lynchian, similar to Laura Palmer's dreams in Fire Walk with Me, but not in a creepy way. And the inspiration for this idea originated from the fact that my friends and I have this habit of rating our burps, and we had this little joke about living in a land of burps and being the queen and kings in a burping land. working pics We discovered an interesting statistic: burps are considered inappropriate in Britain (I'm not sure), but farts are considered normal. But my friends and I believe that as long as our burps are not smelly, we can burp!  I believe it is challenging social norms in some ways because it is sometimes "inappropriate" to have these physiological phen...
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