Tan’s father is Chinese-Indonesian and her mother is Australian. She grew up in Australia and studied in Germany and the Netherlands. Her multicultural background led her to seek out family members scattered around the globe and interview them for this film.
Through a grey blanket of clouds, we barely discern the contours of Mount Fuji, a volcano with many faces. 4,500 exceptional and diverse photographs from the past 150 years form the basis for Ascent. Made entirely with stills, it is a filmic experiment balancing between documentary and fiction, photography and film, where an English woman and her deceased Japanese partner, Hiroshi, lead the way. As Mount Fuji is climbed across geographical, temporal and cultural divides, the narrative unfolds, exploring unexpected paths.
The life and work of enigmatic Dutch/Californian conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who in 1975 disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker René Daalder, the picture becomes a sweeping overview of contemporary art films as well as an epic saga of the transformative powers of the ocean.
In the form of an associative collage, Tan unfolds a personal vision of how we currently relate to images, concentrating on photography – a medium we particularly employ to create a picture of the world, to piece together what we call reality.