Hong Kong indie film season at Harbour Lights Event
- Date:
- 3 - 5 May 2024
- Venue:
- Harbour Lights Picturehouse, Ocean Village, Southampton
Event details
The University of Southampton Film Department, in association with the Hong Kong Film Festival in the UK and Picturehouse Cinemas, will be hosting screenings and discussions of some of the most significant recent Hong Kong indie films, with a post-screening Q&A.
Friday 3 May 2024: Selected award-winning/award-nominated Hong Kong short films
Saturday 4 May 2024: Elegies (dir. Ann Hui, Hong Kong, 2023)
Sunday 5 May 2024: Fly Me to the Moon (dir. Sasha Chuk, Hong Kong 2023)
Each of the screenings tells us different stories about the place Hong Kong, and the people connected to it. The films are locally oriented while also having international relevance. They show us the cultural specificities of Hong Kong, being a former British Crown Colony and now a special administrative region of the PRC.
This series of screenings and discussions is part of the knowledge exchange and enterprise activities related to the ongoing research of Dr Ruby Cheung (Associate Professor in Film Studies) in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, in particular in exploring film industrial practices of those independent Hong Kong filmmakers still based in Hong Kong and those who, due to political reasons, have left the place recently and joined the rapidly growing Hong Kong diasporic community in the West.
About the films
Elegies
(dir. Ann Hui, Hong Kong, 2023; Genre: documentary)
From The Secret (1979), Boat People (1982) to Love After Love (2020), and from family struggles, ghost stories to the wartime history of the city, versatile Hong Kong auteur Ann Hui—Winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (77th Venice International Film Festival in 2020) with a continuous filmmaking career spanning more than four decades—finally films a topic she holds most dear: poetry. Through her personal encounters with some of Hong Kong’s most notable poets, including Yam Gong, Wai Yuen, Chan Chi Tak, Deng Ah Lam, York Ma, Xi Xi and Leung Ping Kwan, Hui shows the topography of contemporary poetry on and of the city.
Fly Me to the Moon
(dir. Sasha Chuk, Hong Kong, 2023; Genre: drama)
Debut feature film director Sasha Chuk brings us a fiction film that tells the story of a pair of sisters, who moved from Hunan in the PRC to Hong Kong in the 1990s. Over a span of twenty years, they have faced with identity crisis, poverty and their drug-addictive father.