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Cloud with Salts

One day in the 70s, at the Northern New Territories.  Under the brazing sun, the sound of cicadas intertwined with the rotten smell near the train tracks. The five youngsters could not dismiss the summer blues. They pushed the weeds and stepped on the squirming maggots. They found a decaying dead body trapped under the burning sun. It was oozing a foul stench.  They covered their nose and vomited. Hearing the train whined, the youngsters made up their minds.  Even though they did not have much, they answered the call from the syrup and caffeine. They added colour to their lives with a pinch of salt onto the transparent White Cloud, and they dashed in full strength and leaped up.

Cloud with Salts

NR N/A
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
Moving

Ngau Tau Kok Estate is one of the oldest and largest public housing projects in Hong Kong. Most of the residents are either elderly and live alone, or working class families. Since 2001, after the government announced its plan to redevelop the area, residents have been gradually relocated to new housing estates. Following two social workers who work with the residents as they deal with the relocation, the film offers is a glimpse of the lives of old people. It is a group portrait of our parents and grandparents.

Moving

NR 2003
Snuggle

Snuggle explores different generations' views on aging and death through the experiences of three families struggling with elderly caretaking and imminent loss. Commissioned by the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, the moving documentary was shot over two years, bearing witness to the difficult journeys and decisions of life and death confronted by ordinary people. The Lees face multiple tragedies in a short period of time as the patriarch, himself tormented with illness, deals with the grief of losing his daughter and wife. His son hopes that he will soon find peace in heaven. The Chans live in an elderly home and rely on their unmarried middle-aged daughter who has long carried the financial and emotional pressure of caring for them. Lam Siu Ming duly carries out filial responsibilities for the only family he has left, the cancer-stricken mentally disabled mother who abandoned him as a child.

Snuggle

NR 2016
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
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
Rice Distribution

The Ghost Festival takes place during the seventh lunar month. The gates of hell are opened to free the hungry ghosts who wander the world seeking food. During this month, Chinese pay tribute to their ancestors and offer food to the deceased to appease them and ward off bad luck. In Hong Kong, besides staging ceremonies to honor the dead, many Taoist organizations also give away rice to the elderly and the poor. The rice distribution depicted in this film was one of the largest events, and attracted over eight thousand people. The event was scheduled to last from nine in the morning to six in the evening. In order to ensure a place in the line, most of the participants arrived before dawn.

Rice Distribution

6.5 2003
E-Ticket

A film sixteen thousand splices in the making. E-Ticket is a frantic (re)cataloguing of a personal archive and an opportunity for rebirth to forgotten images. 35mm photographs and moving pictures are obsessively cut apart, reshuffled then tape spliced together inch by inch in rigid increments. My photographs may have all been cut up and mixed around, but at least they’re all in one place now. A retelling of Dante's Inferno for the streaming age; a freedom of movement reserved for the modern cloud.

E-Ticket

4.0 2019
In Search of the Dragon's Tale

Follows the story of a handicapped street musician, Maurice Chan, as he explains what life is like for him in Hong Kong. In the process we go on a journey back in time to the Walled City of Kowloon. Once dubbed the 'sleaziest' place in Hong Kong, it was an island of Chinese sovereignty within the British colony. As a result of a secret political compromise between the Chinese and British Governments the Walled City was destroyed in 1992. This decision resulted in the displacement of the Walled City's 40,000 residents. The documentary gives the story of modern day Hong Kong from a personal viewpoint and shows historical links to a place the authorities preferred to forget.

In Search of the Dragon's Tale

NR 1997