All Memories Were Once Strange

Presented as part of the Hong Kong Film Festival 2025, this programme brings together seven works by pioneering and emerging Hong Kong video artists, spanning from 1990 to 2025. They uncover hybrid terrains of memory, erasure, representation and vanishing. These works blur the boundaries between archive and affect, collective history and personal reverie – disrupting binaries such as coloniser/colonised, native/foreign, original/translated. Moving across eras of social unrest, global capitalism, technological flux, and linguistic hybridity, memory surfaces in fractured, shifting patterns where meaning drifts, overlaps, and re-emerges.

Programme:

Diversion
Ellen Pau, 1990, 5 min

Produced a year after the June 4th incident, Diversion reflects on Hong Kong’s emigration wave. Archival swimming contest scenes and found footage – including a burning newspaper goat-head – unfold as darkly humorous metaphors, a personal reflection on collective memory.

Recycling Cinema
Ellen Pau, 1999, 8 min

An allegory of memory, reality, metaphysics and cinema, the work transcends the sociological, theoretical or formal conventions of cinematic practice through various experimental explorations of a Hong Kong expressway.

Who's Afraid of Ghost!?
Anson Mak, 2009, 15 min

Through re-exploring the local Ghost Festival, this experimental documentary expresses the artist’s revisits to childhood experience and her concern of Kwun Tong which is undergoing the largest urban re-development plan (2009-2026) ever in Hong Kong.

Non Place ▪ Other Space
Linda Chiu-han Lai, 2009, 13 min

A video diary compiling years of the artist’s visual ethnography – walking the cities of Hong Kong and Macau (1991–2008). ‘Walking through’ becomes a precarious act – the work explores states which are neither monumental, nor illusionary.

Muted Bridges
Winnie Wai-yin Yan, 2021, 16 min

A quiet observation over a year of five bridges on Hong Kong Island between 2019 and 2021, that were once canvases of political expression during social unrest. Now refurbished and stripped of their markings, the bridges stand as mute witnesses to what has been erased.

The Memory of a Cicada Is Longer Than Its Life
Chan Hau Chun, 2024, 6 min

A portrait of a park once vital to communal life. Waves of cicada song envelop blurred, sun-drenched images of kapok trees and passersby – suggesting a suppressed, flickering memoryscape between presence and disappearance.

Too Long Ago, Not Far
Winnie Wai-yin Yan, 2024, 13 min

Shot on Super 8 before emigrating to the UK, this artist reframes the city through Huaying Tongyu, published in 1867, one of the earliest English-Cantonese textbook. Merging phonetic notations, ambient visuals, and intimate gestures, it becomes an archive of language, longing, and departure.

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The Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns for its third edition from 12–28 September in London, presenting reflective, boundary-shifting cinema from Hong Kong and the ESEA diaspora. This year’s programme foregrounds transient and transitioning identities, exploring perspectives on migration, activism, marginalised communities, and gender, highlighting also the creative lens of women filmmakers. From dynamic contemporary works to intimate personal narratives, the festival centres voices that challenge, navigate, and reimagine belonging. More info: www.hkff.uk

This screening is presented in partnership with Hong Kong Action Archives: https://web.hkaa.co

With thanks to Phoenix Ngo Chun Tse