Christopher Doyle: Filming in the Neon World

West Estate

2020

West Estate spotlights the severe housing problems in Hong Kong, taking the spirit of resistance outside of the protest. The damaged walls in the cage-like tenements reflect the many forms of social injustice as well as Hongkongers’ widespread sense of rootlessness. Connecting three stories from different households like puzzle pieces, the film depicts people’s despair over issues of family, sexuality, love, and freedom.

Trial and Error

2020 · ★ 6

This Anti-ELAB (Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill) Movement documentary short takes us back to the airport occupation on 12 August 2019. Although this new form of protest soon turned into a crisis, it became an important lesson for the protesters. Compared to the tension inside the airport terminal, the long walk home at sunset on the Lantau highway, which connects the Hong Kong International Airport to the residential areas, felt like a reminiscence of a school field trip.

Godard Cinema

2023 · ★ 5.6

Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era's progressive and anti-war youth. Sixty-two years and 140 films later, Godard is among the most renowned artists of all time, taught in every film school yet still shrouded in mystery. One of the founders of the French New Wave, political agitator, revolutionary misanthrope, film theorist and critic, the list of his descriptors goes on and on. Godard Cinema offers an opportunity for film lovers to look back at his career and the subjects and themes that obsessed him, while paying tribute to the ineffable essence of the most revered French director of all time.

In Want of a Mask

2020 · ★ 4

The COVID-19 exploded in China in early 2020. Thousands of people from the mainland rushed to Hong Kong that made the people panic. The supply of the face masks cannot meet the demand. Some non-governmental organizations distributed face masks to the elderly in early February that attracted lots of people to queue up.

Lumière, Le Cinéma!

2024 · ★ 7

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

Otar Iosseliani, le merle siffleur

2006 · ★ 5

Georgian director Otar Iosseliani prepares his film Jardins en Automne. Nothing is conventional in the filmmaker's system: Julie Bertuccelli portrays the gestation and production of a film that seems to follow the freest and most unpredictable poetic intuitions of its creator. The constant and hilarious arguments with the producer, Martine Marignac, a Michel Piccoli transformed into an old woman, and the director's peculiar filming system, in which he signals his actors to start with a whistle, paint a picture of one of the most unclassifiable cinematic experiences in contemporary cinema.

Opium: The White Powder Opera

1976

Set in Hong Kong, the narcotics documentary Opium: The White Powder Opera (1976-77) was commissioned by a British television station. Yung, its associate producer and cinematographer, joined the surveillance team of the Narcotics Bureau to acquaint himself with the workings of the drug trade. This paved the way for The System. In addition to the cat-and-mouse game between the cops and the druglord, a fascinating thread traces the relationship among dealers, junkies and mules in Sai Ying Pun. The title hails from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, another tragedy concerned with a capitalist society’s oppressed and exploited nobodies.

Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony

2008 · ★ 8.5

Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.

Heart Murmurs

2023

Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.

Kwai Shing West Estate

2021

A homage to the social housing architecture that is so atypical of Hong Kong - especially the Kwai Shing West Estate. About half of the population lives in such building complexes, where one experiences a strong sense of loneliness. The neighborhoods are the scene of modern living conditions, but also of social protests, which have been punishable by life imprisonment in Hong Kong since 2020 due to a new law.

Hong Kong Fooey

HongAFI nominated director, Charlie Hill-Smith’s first documentary, is a telling insight into the complexities that face modern China. In 1997 the most free market city of earth was consumed by the last great communist state, but who is China? What is China? Travel from Hong Kong to Beijing to Tibet to grab a warts and all snap shot of the Middle Kingdom as it rises to become the great power of the twenty first century.

Muted Bridges

2023

Muted Bridges records five oddly refurbished bridges in the Hong Kong Island which were once heavily covered with slogans, signs and information during the social unrest. It is a direct response to my previous work 'Tugging Diary,' where everything are renewed, erased, as if there’s a new page awaiting.