Flowing Stories 河上變村

17 Feb

Hong Kong, France / 2014 / 97 mins / Colour / In Cantonese, Wai Tau dialect, Hakka and French with Chinese and English subtitles / Dir. Tsui Shan TSANG

2023 / 03 / 20 (MON) - 18:45
This film is being played as part of A Mirror Image : Hong Kong X Taiwan Documentaries parallel programme, Whispers with A Holy Family
Genesis Cinema BOOK NOW
2023 / 03 / 21 (TUE) - 18:30
This film is being played as part of A Mirror Image : Hong Kong X Taiwan Documentaries parallel programme, Whispers with A Holy Family
Cameo Picturehouse BOOK NOW

Filmed on locations in Hong Kong and in various cities in France and UK, Flowing Stories is an ode to village life and a journey in search of Hong Kongers’ collective roots. Tsang’s camera records the beautiful scenery and time-honoured customs of the local village, as well as a once-a-decade village festival, which serves as a continuation of a tradition passed down through generations and a testament of family bonding. Seeing how a lot of Hong Kong citizens nowadays are confused about the future, the director hopes to explore the meaning of home and diaspora through reviewing the village’s development in this documentary.

Tsang Tsui-Shan, Best New Director of the 31st Hong Kong Film Award 2012. Tsang studied sound design at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts’s School of Film and Television in 2001 before she entered the MFA program in Media Design and Technology at the City University of Hong Kong, graduating in 2005. Beginning with short film productions, her works have been presented internationally. Her films have typically focused on female stories in the humanitarian grounds. In 2008 her first directed feature film Lovers On the Road won the Best Drama Award of the 8th South Taiwan Film Festival. And her second feature Big Blue Lake succeed internationally, it had won the Jury Special Award of the Golden Koala Chinese Film Festival 2013 and the Asian New Talent Jury Prix of the Shanghai International Film Festival 2012. TSANG finished her French/ Hong Kong co-production feature documentary Flowing Stories, which received the FilmAid Asia’s Humanitarian Award in 2016. Her feature dramas also included a mainland drama Scent released in 2014 and The Lady Improper in 2019. Apart from narrative features, Tsang keeps pushing her boundaries in dialogues with different art disciplines, and has been collaborating with different local dancers since 2015 to make dance video works. In 2020, her first VR project Chroma 11 was officially selected by the 79th Venice International Film Festival, under the Venice Immersive section.
Ho Chung Village in Sai Kung is a village of 400 years of history. As a native villager who was born and raised here, the changes in the village over the years give me mixed feelings. After all those years living in the village, my bonding to the village and the land has inspired me to create related works. There has never been any documentary depicting the life of the native villagers in Hong Kong. As a native villager and a Hong Kong film director, I have been recording the people and the stories of the village through sound and moving images since 2001, with an aim to preserve the local history and culture. Flowing Stories enable us to witness the beautiful changes of the community.
On one hand, Flowing Stories captures the essence of the Village Festival in 2011, while it also depicts the story of the Lau family, my neighbour in the village. Flowing Stories explores the issue of diaspora and the definition of “home”. I am a village girl who has been living in the village throughout my entire life, while the editor of the film, Mary Stephen is a Chinese diaspora who has left Hong Kong for decades. Flowing Stories can be seen as our dialogue about home, one’s roots and the experience of drifting. Facing the flowing of life, I feel that by returning to where one was born is the only way to achieve a sense of peacefulness and comfort.
As the local traits of places around the world all start to blur, and when heritage and tradition begin to disappear, I hope that Flowing Stories can inspire you to rethink the meaning of history, home and root, as well as the relationship between tradition and development.
Winner of The Best Documentary Film at The 14th South Taiwan Film Festival 2015
Jury’s Special Mention, Hong Kong Documentary Award at the Chinese Documentary Festival 2015
The 10th Hong Kong - Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF)
Paris Project, 2012
CAAMFest 2015
Asia Triennial Manchester 2014
The 33rd Vancouver International Film Festival 2015
The 22nd Filmfest Hamburg, Germany 2014
The 2nd Chinese Women’s Documentary Film Festival in Brown University 2014
The 3rd Singapore Chinese Film Festival, Singapore 2015
Festival Premiers Plan d' Angers 2014
Macau Independent Film Festival 2014
The 38th Hong Kong International Film Festival Documentary Competition, Hong Kong 2014
MaD 2015
Grasscamp 2015