PRESS RELEASE: Hong Kong Film Festival UK Returns in September 2025 Across the UK For Third Edition, Launching Festival and Programme

Written By Roz Stoughton

LONDON, 14 August 2025 – Hong Kong Film Festival UK (HKFFUK) returns for its third edition from 12-28 September in London, presenting reflective, boundary-shifting cinema from Hong Kong and the ESEA diaspora. The festival will tour to other cities from October onwards. 

  • 52 titles in total, with 18 narrative and documentary features, 34 short films. 

  • 2 world premieres and 7 UK premieres for feature presentations. 

  • More than 50% of the programme is directed by women with an ESEA background. 

  • London Venues include the ICA, Picturehouse Central, Garden Cinema, The Rio, Theatreship, Close-up Cinema, Act One, and Sutton Throwley Yard. 

  • Programme highlights: 

    • Montages of a Modern Motherhood (Opening Film, UK Premiere)

    • Ten Years (10th Anniversary) - A 2015 exploration of Hong Kong in 2025

    • Queerpanorama (UK Premiere, Berlinale Selection) 

    • Clara Law retrospective: Drifting Petals (Closing Film), They Say The Moon Is Fuller Here, Farewell China, Goddess of 1967

    • Lviv Diary (World Premiere) 

    • Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio with Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung - A Floating Screening

    • Spacked Out (2K Restoration, 25th Anniversary)

    • Two new Anthony Wong features - Valley of the Shadow of Death and Next Stop, Somewhere.

This year’s programme foregrounds transient and transitioning identities, exploring perspectives on migration, activism, marginalised communities, and gender supported by the BFI Audience Projects Fund, awarding National Lottery funding. From dynamic contemporary works to intimate personal narratives, the festival centres voices that challenge, navigate, and reimagine belonging, spanning works from Hong Kong, the UK, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia and more. 

HKFFUK is an independent film festival established in 2022, aiming to build and bridge the UK’s Hong Kong community through the lens of film and cinema-going. Holding over 100 screenings and events in the past 3 years, we have reached more than 18,000 audience members across the country and are continuing to grow. 

Our 2025 edition especially amplifies female voices, highlighting the creative lens of women filmmakers – more than 50% of the films in the programme are directed by women. This includes celebrating the often overlooked achievements of pioneering Hong Kong female filmmakers such as a retrospective on renowned Hong Kong New Wave filmmaker Clara Law, as well as showcasing works by spearheading video artist Ellen Pau and iconic actresses Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. 

Key supporters and partners of the festival this year include the BFI, Amnesty International UK, Queer East, UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities, KCL Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, and Bosla Arts. 

Opening with Montages of a Modern Motherhood (2024), a “sensitive” and “empathetic” social realist take that “evocatively captures the bone-deep exhaustion of new motherhood” (Screen Daily), HKFFUK 2025 dives headfirst into the array of experiences that comes with being a woman from East and Southeast Asia (ESEA). The festival will close with Clara Law’s newest Golden-Horse winning work Drifting Petals (2021), a 5-year self-funded project shot with a hand-held camera, capturing nocturnal journeys on the streets and reflecting on memories of Hong Kong and Macau. Both films are UK premieres. 

Additional highlights include the 10th anniversary screening of Ten Years (2015), the Chinese-banned anthology film envisioning a dystopian Hong Kong in 2025, and the 25th anniversary of Spacked Out (2000), Lawrence Lau’s coming of age cult classic exploring teenage realities and sexualities. Both monumental films from the city, we explore how narratives have been reframed upon revisits in 2025. 

We are also pleased to be hosting the world premiere of Lviv Diary (2025) by iconic Hong Kong documentary filmmaker Tammy Cheung, which observes the Ukraine War in the city of Lviv. This screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with Cheung. The Berlinale-selected Queerpanorama (2025) will see its UK premiere at HKFFUK as well, a tender exploration into Hong Kong’s queer lives and queer desire by Golden Horse-winning writer-director Jun Li. 

To uplift local curatorial talent and to deepen Hong Kong’s connection with the ESEA community, six guest curators have been invited to shape our programme this year. The result is a poignant expansion of activism and diaspora perspectives, and a celebration of women who built Hong Kong cinema’s distinguished flair. 

Championing new talent and voices, the festival features a wide range of short films by emerging ESEA filmmakers with 7 short film programmes. This includes “Afterimage”, reflecting on collective trauma and featuring Golden Horse winning documentary short Colour Ideology Sampling.mov (2024), “All memories were once strange”, bringing together avant garde works by Hong Kong video artists from 1990-2025, and “Contours of Migration”, which features a prism of diasporic experiences across ESEA immigrants. An online programme will be available for audiences outside of London to expand accessibility. 

Multi-sensory experiences and interactive events are prioritised throughout our programme, such as a floating screening of Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio (1993) on the historical boat Theatreship at Canary Wharf, interactive workshops, a lecture performance, food experiences, a discussion on video game Sleeping Dogs, and a walking tour of Brick Lane’s diasporic history to revive different senses of community and the collective film-watching experience.

There will also be a family-friendly short film programme “Feels Like Home”, an outdoor festive screening at Urban Garden Fair’s Mid Autumn Market, and two programmes tracing parallels between Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea that further connects local ESEA communities together and increasing accessibility to ESEA cinema. 

Through local venue partnerships, HKFFUK further engages in direct relationship building with local communities of Sutton, Hackney, Kingston and Ealing for our London edition in September, and will tour to Manchester, Birmingham, and Edinburgh from October 2025 to early 2026. 

Festival Director, Ching Wong, says, “Across the programme, ‘transient and in transition’ unfolds in an ongoing dialogue with the present: lives poised between departure and return; memory and (de)colonisation discourses interrupted, and a retrospective tracing decades of filmmaking attentive to diaspora, drift, and reinvention. We bring into focus a lineage of Hong Kong women filmmakers often overlooked, while shaping this edition with ESEA practitioners embedded across our team and invited as guest programmers. 

Hong Kong’s new and established diaspora, together with wider ESEA communities, continue to shape the UK’s cultural fabric; A safe and reflective social space and films where shared identity is vital to be made visible, openly discussed and carried forward. With gratitude to our funders, partners, filmmakers, artists, collaborators, our team and volunteers, we look forward to meeting you in the cinema in London and across the city.” 

Venue partners of HKFFUK 2025 are Picturehouse Central, the ICA, Garden Cinema, The Rio, Theatreship, Close-up Film Centre, Sutton Throwley Yard, Ealing Picturehouse, Act One, Goldsmiths College UoL, New Malden Methodist Church, and Stoke Newington Loading Bar. 

Tickets are now available to purchase at hkff.uk or via ticketing sites of each venue. Please find the press kit here, which includes stills and information on the programme. 

The following will be attending in-person Q&As:

  • Tammy Cheung - Lviv Diary, Director

  • Jacky Leung - Four Trails, Documentary subject, finisher of Hong Kong Four Trails Ultra Challenge, completed 298km in 50 hours

  • Don Ng - No Time For Goodbye, Director

Online/Hybrid Q&As:

  • Clara Law and Eddie Fong - Director, writer and producers

  • James Lee and Jeremiah Foo - Next Stop, Somewhere, Director and producer

  • Toru Kubota, Sai (in person), Tammy Cheung (in person) - Resisters in Borderland, Director, Burmese Artist & Activist, and Hong Kong documentary filmmaker 

  • Filmmakers from short film programmes will attend hybrid Q&A sessions

In-person guests and event participants:

  • Professor Stephen Ching-kiu Chan and Dr Law Wing-sang - Cinema Strada, Academics for panel discussion

  • Ngo Chun Phoenix Tse - Cinema Strada, Lecture performer

  • Jenn Leung - “A World, A Girl, A Gun” worldbuilding workshop, Facilitator, lecturer and artist

  • Fedzilla, Creative Writing Workshop, Facilitator, Rapper and Poet

More to be announced on hkff.uk and social channels. 

An appendix with a full list of the festival programme is attached below. Further inquiries and questions can be directed to Xinyi Wang at xinyi.wang@hkff.uk or press@hkff.uk. 

Roz Stoughton