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Young Chinese-American filmmaker Wei-ming travels from New York to his childhood home on Lamma Island to make a video documentary about the imminent opening of a Disneyland theme park in Hong Kong. While doing research for the project, he meets Larry, a dancer/choreographer.
Instead of following the wishes of her parents and flying to Toronto, Mo-yung (Anita Yuen) journeys instead to NYC, in hope of finding Benny (Simon Yam), the man she loves. There, she meets Rubie, a sympathetic clinic worker who helps her to settle in the city.
The Umbrella Movement of 2014, also known as the Occupy Movement, paved the way for Hong Kong’s current upheavals, but unfolded in significantly different ways. This creative documentary focuses on the intellectual, political, and discursive underpinnings of the social and political actions of 2014, before fast-forwarding to 2019. A range of thoughtful and engaged intellectuals, students, scholars, activists, and artists including Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man, Ray Wong, and Agnes Chow (many of whom are facing imprisonment for their democratic activism) articulate a range of philosophies, viewpoints and emotions, set against Hong Kong’s spectacular urban background of skyscrapers, night lights, and street-occupying mass movements.
In 1995, the young Taiwanese woman writer Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in Paris's Montmartre district, leaving behind the autobiographical novel LAST WORDS IN MONTMARTRE. Two decades later, the novel was published in English by the prestigious New York Review Books, bringing Qiu renown in Western literary circles and quickly prompting translations into other European languages. Qiu is considered the first openly lesbian novelist in the history of Chinese literature; her debut novel, NOTES OF A CROCODILE, became a "Bible" for the Taiwanese lesbian community and an underground classic in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with an official edition finally published in 2012. DEATH IN MONTMARTRE travels through Taiwan, Paris, and New York to trace the life of this literary star who enjoyed fame only after her death, interviewing literary masters from Taiwan, France, and the U.S. while discussing LGBTQ culture and lesbian literature from a perspective of equality.
Four years later, Hong Kong’s 2014 democratic Umbrella Movement has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, yet political backlash against protesters has intensified. Repeatedly the target of censorship*, Raise the Umbrellas traces the lineage of the massive Hong Kong protest to the global Occupy movement, 1989 Tiananmen, and its democratic struggles since British colonial days. Highlights range from the Umbrella Movement’s eco-awareness and its burgeoning aspiration for independence, to its empowerment of women -- “umbrella mothers” -- and the rainbow-bridging activism of LGBTQ iconic artists. Incisive and intimate, driven by stirring on-site footage in a major Asian metropolis riven by protest, Umbrellas includes anti-Occupy views that lay bare the sheer political risk for post-colonial Hong Kong’s universal-suffragist striving to define its autonomy within China.
Part literary documentary, part fantasy romance, LOVE & DEATH IN MONTMARTRE explores the life and work of lesbian Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin, whose suicide at age 26 devastated a generation of queer youth and whose ardent claim to her own right to love accelerated the movement for queer rights in Taiwan. Largely told through Qiu’s own words, we are shown a young woman’s longing not just for another’s love but for herself. In the face of a society’s suppression of sapphism, she writes and lives furiously.
Student rebels, labor organizers, Trotskyites, anarchists, sojourners in Paris, and human rights activists are the cast of real-life characters featured in THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WU ZHONG XIAN. Based on a stage play, this DV feature traces the poignant trajectory of a rebel whose dream of world revolution first landed him in battles against British colonialism in the 70s, and later on his deathbed in the mid-90s, in agonies over the uncertain fate of a revitalized China. Revealing a little-known chapter of rebellion and idealism, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WU ZHONG XIAN is a timely, resonant docu-drama for today's Hong Kong, China, and our ideologically-disillusioned era.
The music and influences of experimental pianist Margaret Leng Tan, featuring concert clips and interviews.
Documentary about the 1999 Sino-Portuguese handover.
A portrait of novelist Dung Kai-cheung alongside the social and political history of an Asian metropolis where mass protests now afflict the city and its people.