ProgrammeLingnan Images – A Cinematic Dialogue Across Hong Kong, Macao, Shenzhen & Guangzhou

Curator’s Note

Following presentations in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, the grand finale of “Lingnan Images – A Cinematic Dialogue Across Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen & Guangzhou” now arrives in Macau.

Shaped by the interplay of traditional Lingnan, Northern, and Western cultures, the cinemas of Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou have always embodied diversity, openness, and integration, much like the blending of fresh and salt water that is unique to this region. Though the pace and trajectory of cinematic development may differ across the four cities, their films have always resonated with the social, cultural, civic, and economic transformations of the region, interconnected and inseparable.

Since the beginning of China’s reform and opening-up policy, the Greater Bay Area has witnessed rapid social change. Following the Hong Kong New Wave, the local identity and subjectivity of the region’s cinema have become increasingly pronounced, with creativity surging in waves. By the 2000s, the rise of digital technology had gradually dismantled the technical barriers of industrial film production, empowering young filmmakers to express themselves through moving images and injecting new vitality into cinematic creation.

In addition to two Hong Kong productions - Father and Son and Man on the Brink - and one Macanese film, Revisit, this festival devotes its attention to works from the Mainland that Macau audiences have had fewer opportunities to encounter. Knitting and Eight Diagrams portray the struggles and bewilderment of ordinary people swept up in the tide of early urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, as Guangzhou transformed from its Lingnan roots into a modern migrant city. Something in Blue and Damp Season explores the love, loss, and spiritual searching of individuals amid the vast metropolis of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. All About ING and Revisit focus on reconciliation and reconstruction within families and among the younger generation, showing that, as in tasting water, small differences can be profoundly important.

Two significant works during the Era of Hong Kong New Wave, Father and Son and Man on the Brink, have seldom been mentioned in recent years. The former shares an affinity with HOU Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and Giuseppe TORNATORE’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), though it predates both. The latter broadened the scope of the crime genre and left a lasting influence on later Hong Kong undercover films such as Infernal Affairs.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. To commemorate the occasion, Scholars Under Fire has been chosen as the opening film. The film recounts the story of Lingnan scholars who persevered in running schools during wartime, resisting with scholarship against gunfire, and restoring the nation through education. Directed by GAN Xiao’er, himself a university professor, the work pays tribute to the pioneers of education by recreating the heroic episode of Sun Yat-sen University’s relocation to Pingshi in northern Guangdong more than 80 years ago to escape the ravages of war.

We hope you will enjoy and read these cinematic “images” carefully, thereby deepening your understanding of the Lingnan region we inhabit.

Co-Curators: FENG Yu, LAW Kar