BY JESSIE LAU
From a delicate rendering of a young mother’s heartbreaking struggle with postpartum depression to a dreamy, experimental film that follows the nocturnal journeys of Hongkongers grappling with echoes of the region’s past political upheavals – the diverse selection of films at this year’s Hong Kong Film Festival UK beautifully captured the nuanced and quiet subversiveness of the city’s dazzling cinematic repertoire, with a focus on spotlighting the work of the city’s women directors.
Now in its third edition, the annual festival brings films from Hong Kong’s “New Wave” – a cinematic movement in the ’80s centred around the city’s recent dramatic transformations – to a British audience. This year, half of the films in the programme were by female filmmakers, exploring themes such as migration, activism, marginalised communities, and gender. The festival opened in London at the end of summer before embarking on its Other Cities Tour, which runs from mid-October to February and brings a curated selection of highlights to audiences in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Brighton.
As the tour makes its way across the country, festival and programme director Ching Wong spoke to NüVoices about her reflections on this year’s film selection, the event’s focus on female directors, and her advice for aspiring filmmakers:
Congratulations on a successful third edition of the film festival! I was very excited to learn about this year’s focus on highlighting the work of female filmmakers, including the special retrospective featuring four films by the iconic Clara Law. Could you tell us more about that focus?
This year, we deliberately shaped our programme so that approximately half of the films are directed by women. But that figure alone isn’t the story. What really drove us was a desire to re-frame how women’s filmmaking is spoken about — to move beyond the familiar trope that women’s cinema is primarily about emotion or intimacy, and instead gesture toward the deep analytical, historical and structural work that many of these films undertake.
In our festival context, we were very conscious of how gender is entangled with all the urgent themes of our time: neoliberalism, social disparity and deprivation, hyper-developmentalism, ecological crisis, new forms of social inequality and injustice. Women’s voices are not only delicate, expressive or interior: they are vantage points from which one can critically interrogate how those macro-phenomena impact everyday lives, bodies and communities.
These are such important points – it’s definitely true that women’s filmmaking is often discussed through an “emotive” rather than, say, sociological lens. Can you explain more about that and how this is captured in the specific projects you chose this year?
When I speak of “emotional expression and narrative,” I mean that emotional registers — affect, interiority, relationality — are important and valid but they should not obscure the fact that many of the films we’ve selected are also operating as sociological tools. They map systems of power, trace historical legacies, unpick taboo silences, and imagine alternative modes of being.
In this edition, our cross generation, all-female experimental shorts programme all memories were once strange, we treat ritual as urban analysis, infrastructure as memory and erasure, and language as archive. We blur the boundaries between archive and affect, collective history and personal reverie—disrupting binaries such as coloniser/colonised, native/foreign, original/translated. Our opener Montages of Motherhood threads postpartum experience through housing, care and gendered labour; and the Clara Law retrospective maps diaspora as a political condition across Hong Kong, London and beyond with her unique aesthetics — proof that emotion and analysis aren’t opposites but twin engines for connection, critique and resistance.
It was great to see Montages of Motherhood – a provocative film that dives into gendered and taboo topics surrounding motherhood such as postpartum depression, directed by Oliver Chan and starring Hedwig Tam – featured as the festival’s opener this year. What went into this decision?
Choosing this as our opening film was a conscious statement of intent. On one level, the film addresses issues in Hong Kong, Asia, even globally, that remain under-acknowledged: postpartum depression, the pressures on women’s bodies, motherhood as both culturally celebrated and invisibilised. But beyond that, it presents a mode of storytelling that formally induces the audience to feel and to reflect — montage fragmentation and relational, layered imagery. It is a film that moves deep into the body and sensorial experience of a woman, yet speaks about something both within and beyond the gendered condition.
Rooted in a feminine perspective and a form of social realism, it observes how emotional, physical, and social labour are entangled in an Asian city shaped by traditional family and patriarchal values, class, gender, and economic inequality. The film offers a model: it captures the interiority of a mother’s experience — the fatigue, the ambivalence, the unspoken expectations — and simultaneously situates it within the broader frame of social and institutional forces: housing pressures, healthcare systems, familial obligations, neoliberal productivity regimes. In that sense it opens a conversation about how the “private” becomes politically charged.
By beginning our festival with this film, we invite the audience into that dual realm — the emotional and the analytical. It sets the tone that this isn’t merely a celebratory showcase of women’s feelings, but a rigorous programme of films that asks: what does it mean to live, to suffer, to hope, to resist — as a woman, as a subject in a city shaped by repression and inequality? Opening with this film also connects to our larger curatorial arc: the journeys of the body, the city, and the way women’s experiences register in each of those. It signals that we value not only stories of vulnerability, but stories of resistance, critique, and alternative imaginaries.
You wrote and starred in Ten Years, a dystopian independent film capturing Hongkongers’ anxieties in 2015 over what their home may become by 2025. How did it feel to revisit this project after a decade on its anniversary?
Revisiting Ten Years ten years later was unexpectedly emotional. At the time, the project felt urgent — an artistic response to the anxieties and political realities we were living through. A decade on, the film has taken on a historical weight I couldn’t have anticipated. For me, it’s both a personal and collective time capsule. Looking back now, I also see it through the lens of change — not only in Hong Kong, but in myself as an artist and curator. It reminds me that cinema can be both prophetic and fragile; it captures moments of collective consciousness that continue to evolve.
Filmmaking remains a male-dominated industry, although this is starting to change. Can you share some of the challenges you’ve had to grapple with as a female filmmaker?
The film industry remains overwhelmingly male in its power structures — even while we see change, the pace of that change is painfully slow. Recent studies show that men still hold about 78 per cent of key creative positions in the UK film industry, and only around 14 per cent of films in one decade had at least one female director. That imbalance isn’t abstract — it shapes who gets funded, who is reviewed, and which stories are deemed “universal.” I’ve often encountered these invisible thresholds myself. For women — and especially for those of us working across diasporic and cross-cultural contexts — there’s an added layer of invisibility: the film language and marketing templates are often built for more conventional, Western modes of storytelling, not for hybrid or transnational voices.
There’s also the question of emotional and relational labour. Women are frequently expected to take on mentoring, community-building, and team-care roles that are vital but rarely recognised as creative capital. And then there’s the pressure to make work that feels “safe,” “palatable,” or “internationally legible” — which can mean softening one’s analytical edge or cultural specificity to meet market expectations. Resisting that can be isolating, but it’s also what sustains integrity and innovation.
What advice do you have for women aspiring to do what you do?
My advice to women aspiring to work in film is to trust the intellectual and political force of your perspective. Your lived experience and analytic insight are strengths, not limitations — don’t smooth out your voice to fit a pre-existing mould. Build community with peers, mentors, and collaborators, especially other underrepresented practitioners; solidarity creates alternative routes to visibility and sustainability. Learn the systems as rigorously as you hone your art: Expect a non-linear path; hybrid roles across making, curating, teaching, and collaborating can strengthen your voice rather than dilute it. Above all, claim film as a site of resistance and imagination: let your work connect and console, yes, but also analyse and critique — because changing who gets to speak must come with changing how stories name power and propose different futures.
See the festival’s full programme here.
About Ching Wong
Ching Wong is a London-based film and art curator, writer, and cultural practitioner. She is the co-founder, festival and programming director of the Hong Kong Film Festival UK since 2022 and recently contributed as a community curator to the Migration Museum. Her curatorial practice engages with diasporic subjectivities and transcultural flows, with particular attention to the intersections of cinema, contemporary art, and the politics of memory.
About the author
Jessie Lau is an independent writer, editor and multi-platform journalist from Hong Kong. She’s spent the past decade covering the intersections of human rights, politics and culture from Asia, Europe and the United States. Her essays and reportage have appeared in The Guardian, BBC, Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN, Times Literary Supplement, WIRED, The Economist and many more publications. Jessie is the founder of New Tide, Britain’s only East and Southeast Asian journalism network, head of the magazine team at NüVoices, a non-profit supporting women and minorities working on China topics, and contributing editor at Translator, a publication of translated journalism.
Photo credit: Andy Wong, Ching Wong