The return of the Hong Kong Film Festival

Photo: I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore 傷心公園

Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns to London

Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns for its fourth edition from 25 September to 4 October in London, presenting reflective and shape-shifting cinema from Hong Kong, the wider Asian diaspora and beyond.

It features 21 screenings and events, 40 titles with 17 UK premieres, across 11 venues including the Barbican, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Close-up Cinema, Rio Cinema, Ritzy Picturehouse, and Theatreship.

The main festival will be followed by two seasons of programmes from the end of the year to early 2027. The festival is supported by the BFI Audience Projects Fund, awarding National Lottery Good Cause funding.

Festival and programming director Ching Wong says:

“This year, we wanted the festival to continue to open up different ways of thinking about Hong Kong — not only through where we come from, but through the many places, histories and communities Hong Kong cinema has been connected to. We wanted to look at diaspora as an agency, an active force both behind the camera and on screen — and in that, diasporic communities find themselves speaking to one another.

“This edition also marks the beginning of a more year-round festival. Rather than everything happening within a single stretch, we want to create more time and space for films to travel, for conversations to develop, and for us to build deeper relationships with audiences and communities across the UK.”

The festival opens at the Barbican on 25 September with the UK premiere of Palimpsest: The Story of A Name, which investigates the mystery of an English surname in a Chinese family. It is directed by this year’s Filmmaker in Focus: Mary Stephen, the Hong Kong-born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor. The programme also presents the UK premieres of Stephen’s first feature, Shades of Silk, and her three early experimental shorts. It traces her 20-plus year collaboration with Éric Rohmer as an editor and co-composer through the screenings of The Aviator’s Wife and A Summer’s Tale at the ICA. Stephen will take part in Q&As at this special celebration of her career.

Repositioning (in) Hong Kong Cinema brings contemporary features that explore the fluidity of Hong Kong as a film category. Ten Years’ director Kiwi Chow’s new film Deadline is an Orwellian thriller about an anonymous note that predicts the suicide of an unnamed student in a prestigious school — it mirrors the city’s suffocating education system. Set during the White Terror period in Taiwan, A Foggy Tale by Chen Yu-hsun tells a story of resistance in the face of an authoritarian government that echoes to the present, featuring a Golden Horse Award-nominated performance by Hong Kong star Will Or. The heartwarming local box office hit The Snowball on a Sunny Day by Philip Yung revives the Lunar New Year comedy, while Jonathan Li and Chou Man-yu’s Behind the Shadows is a playful blend of hard-boiled detective fiction and compelling marriage drama that lives up to the trademark crime film genre of Hong Kong cinema.

Classics Revisited presents newly restored films and reappraises overlooked gems from the past. It includes two important works of the Hong Kong 1980s New Wave: My Name Ain’t Suzie, the outstanding second feature film of Angie Chen that was made as a rebuke to the orientalist fairy tale of bar hostesses in the Hollywood romance drama The World of Suzie Wong, as well as Patrick Tam’s star-studded romantic action thriller My Heart is That Eternal Rose, with mesmerising performances by Kenny Bee, Joey Wong and Tony Leung Chiu-wai.

The Experimental & Expanded strand spotlights works that reimagine the possibilities of moving image art. Memory, personal and collective, is a common theme in the programmes: Ka Ki Wong’s feature debut I Heard That They Are Not Going To See Each Other Anymore blurs the lines between performance and reality to incorporate the actors’ own struggles over connection and memories, and will be shown in the country for the first time at the festival; Remanence: The (Un)erasable - Moving Image + Lecture Performance explores voices as both fragile and impossible to fully erase. It features the UK premiere of Rico Wong’s award-winning documentary Compact Disc; City Like Water + Reading & Discussion is an experimental artists’ moving image programme in response to Dorothy Tse’s surrealist novel that captures daily absurdities of Hong Kong’s socio-political transformation.

Presenting in partnership with Amnesty International UK, the strand Narrating Migration traces experiences of exile and migration across different times and places: Comrades’ filmmaker Kanas Liu and Sui Ting Kong co-directed I am fine, thank you, a documentary originated from the ‘We Are Hongkongers’ research project, in which Hongkongers who have moved to the UK since 2019 shared their experiences and feelings in multiple filmed visits. The shorts programme, Inherited Movements, Many Migrations, bridges the stories between people who arrived in Hong Kong, those who left for the UK, and thoee who later return to the hometown.

The festival continues to strengthen Hong Kong’s connection to wider Asian communities in the UK through reflections on migration and colonial history across Malaysia, Iran, The Philippines, Singapore and more. The festival’s Community & Wider Programmes include a free mid-autumn fair screening in Sutton, a game workshop on spatial representations of Hong Kong in local computer art game practices, a visual talk on the city’s relationship to Southeast Asian cinema, a walking tour at the Barbican in dialogue with Hong Kong's walkway culture, and a screening and discussion on Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and beyond. The free virtual programme, Online Panorama, will also return from 25 September to 31 October with the support of Amnesty International Hong Kong Overseas. 

Across contemporary and historical cinema, artists’ moving image and interdisciplinary art practices, the festival moves through questions of migration, colonisation, activism and gender. Together, these works reshape ideas of memory and community.

Venues: Act One Cinema, Barbican, Birkbeck Cinema, Close-up Cinema, Genesis Cinema, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Loading Bar, Oru Sutton, Rio Cinema, Ritzy Picturehouse and Theatreship.

Tickets are available to purchase at hkff.uk or via the ticketing sites of each venue.  

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