“Long Time between Sunsets and Underground Waves” offers an insight into the interplay and struggle between human activity and nature from the non-human perspective of an island, and explores the intertwined relationship between marine culture, legend, islands and the politics of life in a semi-documentary, semi-fictional way. The island in the film seems to be a closed-off, circular ecosystem, with ghostly fires and visions appearing at night in the dense forest, perhaps from the spirits of inhabitants who were slaughtered during the war. Beneath the sea surface, legends and superstitious beliefs about mythical creatures and the nomadic Bajau people still circulate—as do the second-generation immigrants who are scattered across the Malay Archipelago without identity or nationality, seeking a place to live in the “undercurrents”, far from the mainland, separated by choice or by force.
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