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Just Like Snakes

Just Like Snakes is a reinterpretation of the popular Chinese folklore The Legend of the White Snake. In the traditional story, a white snake transforms into a woman and falls in love with a man. When a monk discovers their transgressive romance, he punishes the snake by imprisoning her in a pagoda. This tale has been celebrated across Asia for centuries, evolving to reflect the changing morals of each era. Commissioned by CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) in Hong Kong, Just Like Snakes responds to the city’s first Chinese musical based on the same legend, created by the iconic Chinese diva Rebecca Pan. Through music and dance, the film questions the limitations of story archetypes. Revisiting the folklore as a metaphor for contemporary society, it proposes: now that the pagoda—representing restrictive societal constructs—has collapsed, how might we observe and adapt to a shift in paradigms that calls for new orders in our world today?

Just Like Snakes

NR 2023
Hong Kong: City on Fire

Taking us from Hong Kong's 1997 handover from British rule into Chinese administrative control, all the way to 2019, when a controversial extradition bill is greeted with massive street protests, this urgent film beds in with Hong Kong's pro-democracy demonstrations, offering a frontline portrait of four young protesters through a year of struggle. We see their hopes for a freer life and feel their fears as the authorities crack down. Pulse-racing scenes bring the viewer to street level, where peaceful protest is met with fury and tear gas. Clear-eyed about the complications and contradictions that come with a movement that changed Hong Kong forever, Hong Kong: City on Fire is a brave document of troubled times.

Hong Kong: City on Fire

3.5 2022
One-Way Street on a Turntable

This essay film is about Hong Kong as a place, or rather as a series of places, each with their own series of histories. Mak is after public and private histories, and the ways they commingle, intertwine and sometimes even obliterate each other. Her materials are multiple: she takes what she calls “appropriated archival footage and propaganda films from the 60s and 70s done by the British Hong Kong Government," and cuts, loops, zooms, slows and manipulates them to make striking distortions. To these “official” materials, made strange through video manipulation, Mak adds black-and-white Super 8 video of her own, digitally altered to sometimes look battered and archival, highly worked into a beautifully ghostly, grainy, evanescently visible texture. Images are juxtaposed promiscuously in double and quadruple frames, often paired images of intangibly related material, elegantly matched to be thought provoking as well as to offer visual delight.

One-Way Street on a Turntable

NR 2006
One Education, Two Systems

In late 2015, a group of high school students arranged a four-day exchange program between an international school and a local school in Hong Kong. The exchange was filmed by a team of students from both schools and developed into a 40-minute documentary titled, “One Education, Two Systems”. The aim of the project was to develop mutual understanding and appreciation between students at international schools and traditional local schools in Hong Kong and help bridge the divide in the education system. At the same time, the documentary also seeks to spark discussion on education-related topics, various disparities and other differences between the two systems (teaching styles, mental health, learning attitude, general atmosphere and competitiveness).

One Education, Two Systems

NR 2017
Reflections

Costa Rica, New Zealand, Hong Kong,Hawaii. Through the testimonies of 12 women, the issues of marriage, traditional conventions, being attracted to women and having children are addressed. How to break with traditional patterns, how to accept one's feelings of love when they are are directed towards a person of the same sex? So many serious subjects approached here with lightness. The documentary walks us and takes us towards these women who inevitably speak a little about about us.

Reflections

1.0 2006
Franco Mella

Franco Mella is a devoted figure whose life bridges Catholicism and Communism. He has journeyed through Asia, lived simply, and fought for social justice, notably within Hong Kong's protest history as depicted in "Ordinary Heroes" (1999). Mella's path weaves through religious and revolutionary movements, from church beginnings to Communist activism and the Handover, always driven by his missionary spirit and communist ideals. For four decades, he has steadfastly championed the oppressed, undeterred by shifting politics, expressing solidarity through music and protest, and remaining a symbol of wisdom and resilience for the people of Hong Kong.

Franco Mella

NR 2018
The Seaman and the Dancing Girl

Ling (Li Tziang), a young woman forced to work as a nightclub hostess to support her ailing parents and young siblings, hides the truth about her job from her family. She meets a sailor (Ping Fan) at the club, and the two quickly fall in love. However, just as he is about to propose, a drunken night causes him to miss their appointment, shattering their plans. Heartbroken, Ling faces another tragedy when her mother falls critically ill. Despite her efforts to raise money for treatment, her mother passes away. Her father, now aware of her real occupation, is ashamed yet sorrowful, unable to change Ling’s situation as the family remains burdened by debt and dependent on her income.

The Seaman and the Dancing Girl

NR N/A
Paristanbul

Hong Kong, after the city's last social movement, whose end was accompanied by the arrival of the global pandemic. Despite its efforts, the social movement did not triumph, and the city saw its last ‘legal’ demonstration at the end of 2019. Years later, a traveller returns to her hometown, Hong Kong. During her 9-hour stopover in Istanbul, the meeting point between Europe and Asia, she explores the city and whispers her innermost thoughts. The film shows the adventure of uncertainty before coming face to face again with the concept of home.

Paristanbul

NR 2025
Too Long Ago, Not Far

When I first took up this Super 8 camera, I knew I was about to leave my home. Too Long Ago, Not Far, shot between 2019 to 2023, alludes to the Huaying Tongyu [華英通語, meaning: interchangeable expressions between Chinese and English, first published in 1867 in New York], the earliest English textbook for Chinese people that uses Cantonese phonetic notation to teach the pronunciation of English words. This seamless editing mode offers me the base to record everything in the city as notations, things that I want to look at over and over again. Perhaps by the time I go back, nothing changes, everything remains the same. As the Chinese saying goes, horse keeps on running, and people keeps on dancing.

Too Long Ago, Not Far

NR 2024
Tugging Diary

Tugging Diary documents a footbridge over a year between August 2019 to January 2021. Due to social unrest and the uncertainty of various immediate happenings, both the internet and physical spaces act as critical communication platforms of its own during this period. As such, information can be circulated in the community more widely and rapidly outside of the existing mainstream media. As time goes by, these materials are continuously altered, some were renewed, while the others were removed, covered with paint, or overlaid by other information.

Tugging Diary

7.0 2020
Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It

Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It (2020) is an experimental documentary investigating the intersection of People’s Temple (Jonestown) with the first-person survival horror game Outlast 2 developed by Red Barrel. Departing as the digital study of the game, this project attempts to recontextualize the relationship between the mass suicide of People’s Temple in 1978 and the game’s narrative. Composed by the archival materials from FBI and machinima made with the game, this work conveys uncanny audio and visual journey in the understanding the self-destruction, the religious utopia, the binary between capitalism and socialism.

Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It

4.5 2020
PARK tetralogy summer

In a park, a girl wants to break up with a boy, but things are not that easy... PARK Tetralogy: Summer is one movement of a four-film cycle. The films are four variations on a single theme. The director, YU Yunsheng, explores the same narrative nucleus through four different seasons and four distinct casts. This is a cinematic experiment on memory, time, and the mutability of human emotions. This is a four-film cycle. Total runtime 332 mins. We recommend viewing sequentially or as individual features.

PARK tetralogy summer

NR N/A
Laughless

This is a harmonious town without a single smile to be seen, as the authority restricts the act of smiling, claiming that it could initiate violence and cause social turmoil. Inspector Merit 64 complies with the command of the great bailiff ‘Father’ to safeguard residents' health, when one day he encounters P928, a young man who refuses to stay obedient and tries to act against the power. This rendezvous puts Inspector Merit 64’s loyalty into test, whether to uphold his loyalty to the authority or to put up a smile according to his own wish remains his own choice. A lifelong debate between freedom and stability of living.

Laughless

5.0 2015
Home Floating Away

The region of Danjiangkou Reservoir in Henan is undergoing the migration of 400,000 people to cope with the South-to-North water diversion project. Seventy eight affected fishing households on one of the small islands in the area are told to move onshore, 200 kilometres away from their homes. They protest in vain and fail to get their way, under government pressure. Meanwhile, a thunderstorm hits the island and destroys all their mariculture rafts. The efforts of generations of self-sufficient fishing families are now gone.

Home Floating Away

NR 2013
A Time to Be Born and A Time to Die

Going through rubbish bins of neighbours for scrap metal to sell, putting food on the table for a dependent grandfather and no school, there’s not much of a life for an orphaned boy. Finders, keepers so when he makes a treasure find, he keeps it until its sentimental value is known and its rightful owner, a neighbour girl, located, whereupon stories of similar misfortunes are told, bonds are forged and pledges are made. Yet life can be cruel, even to a little soul who has borne witness to too much death.

A Time to Be Born and A Time to Die

3.0 2012
Raging Land 1: A Record of Choi Yuen Village

This is a film about Choi Yuen Village, documenting villagers’ lives in the summer and autumn of 2009. Suddenly, weekly meetings, guided tours, protests, and ambiguous government consultations entered their routines. They had to recount their personal histories and the meaning of life. The common belief that protests were only about money began to loosen. The word "agriculture" reemerged for Hongkongers. The timeline depicted in the film leads up to the peak of the anti-high-speed rail protests around the Legislative Council. In the end, the railway was decided to build. In spring and summer 2010, villagers searched for land and negotiated with the government to rebuild their homes and lifestyle, valuing community, and coexistence with nature. What sustains their deep connection to land and life?

Raging Land 1: A Record of Choi Yuen Village

NR 2009
Taikwun

The directors majored in MA Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. When directing TAIKWUN (2022), they used the photos taken in Tai Kwun as the material for animation creation. They are committed to exploring different animation possibilities from ordinary materials and textures, and at the same time, they also use animation to interpret and explore different urban characteristics. For the materials they have, they carry out creative interpretations on the basis of taking care of the historical significance of the materials themselves.

Taikwun

NR 2023