All Memories Were Once Strange
Shorts, Experimental
21 Sept 2025 (Sun)
6pm, Close Up Cinema
Runtime: 74’
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.
Presented in partnership with Hong Kong Action Archives.
With thanks to Phoenix Ngo Chun Tse.
Diversion 兩頭唔到岸
Hong Kong | 1990 | Colour | 5’ | In Cantonese with English subtitles
Dir.: Ellen Pau 鮑藹倫
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 循環影院
Hong Kong | 1999 | Colour | 8’ | In Cantonese with English subtitles
Dir.: Ellen Pau 鮑藹倫
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. Exhibited as part of the 49th Venice Biennale.
Who's Afraid of Ghost!? 邊個驚鬼!?
Hong Kong | 2009 | Colour | 15’ | No dialogue with English and Chinese captions
Dir.: Anson Mak 麥海珊
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. M+ Hong Kong Collection.
Non-Place ▪ Other Space 隱城・懸浮半空
Hong Kong | 2009 | Colour | 13’ | No dialogue with English and Chinese captions
Dir.: Linda Chiu-han Lai 黎肖嫻
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
Hong Kong | 2021 | Colour | 16’ | No dialogue
Dir.: Winnie Wai-yin Yan 忻慧妍
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
Hong Kong | 2024 | Colour | 6’ | In Cantonese with English subtitles
Dir.: Chan Hau Chun 陳巧真
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 在不太遙遠的很久以前
Hong Kong | 2024 | Colour | 13’ | In Cantonese with English subtitles
Dir.: Winnie Wai-yin Yan 忻慧妍
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.
