⋆☕︎ Winner of both Best Documentary and Best Editing at the 62nd Golden Horse Awards
⋆☕︎ Veteran editor Mary Stephen makes her new feature
Spanning eight decades and four continents, filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen embarks on a personal investigation into her English surname. It is not intended to be a narcissistic exploration but rather an effort to uncover the dissonances and the contradictions in our heritage that, in spite of our all-too-human desire for harmony and continuity, are the fundamental elements that shape us. It is in this spirit that this intimate journey unfolds.
Drawing from her father’s home movies and diaries, family photographs, her own travel footage, fragments of oral history and official archives, Stephen constructs a layered, polyphonic narrative where personal memory and collective history converge. The film traverses a turbulent period in China’s past—marked by the fall of a fading dynasty, civil war, Japanese invasion, and the eventual rise of the Communist Party. Against this backdrop, Hong Kong— under British colonial rule since 1842—emerges as a paradoxical space, where Western modernity collides with Eastern heritage: a city of one million Chinese governed by twenty thousand Europeans.
Director: Mary Stephen
 | About the Director Mary Stephen is a Canadian editor and director based in France, originally from Hong Kong. As a director of both documentaries and narrative films, Mary Stephen served for many years as the editor for Éric Rohmer’s films and collaborated with him under the collective pseudonym Sébastien Erms to compose the soundtracks for several of his films. In 2018, she was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. | |