The programme brings together films made by female experimental filmmakers working in Asia during the late 1980s and 1990s. These artists engage with a feminist cinematic practice that resonates with the concept of écriture féminine understood here as a process of rewriting and reinscribing inherited histories and narratives with new perspectives. This is evident in works that reimagine cultural myths, such as Pimpaka Towira’s reinterpretation of the well-known Thai ghost folklore in Mae Nak; or one that retraces urban topographies laced with historical trauma through affective performance, as in May Fung’s She Said Why Me. In contrast, My Father Burned and A Wisdom Tooth adopt personal and diaristic approaches, exploring both the tenderness and the complexities of familial relationships, and the weight of inheritance.

Mae Nak | Pimpaka Towira | 1992 | 33’ | Thailand

An experimental take on the folk legend of the ghost Mae Nak Phrakanong. This film subverts perspective, telling the story from the viewpoint of the vengeful spirit of a woman who died in childbirth rather than the terrified villagers.

She Said Why Me | May Fung | 1989 | 9’ | Hong Kong

She Said Why Me follows a blindfolded woman as she feels her way through the streets of Hong Kong. The piece opens at a Chinese temple and moves through the city, with the woman feeling her way along the walls of colonial and contemporary buildings and wanders down streets and through construction sites. The sequence is interspersed with black-and-white archival footage of women in various contexts in the city.

My Father Burned | Haruka Doi | 1994 | 17’ | Japan (UK Premiere)

The film was born from discovering a Super 8 film shot by Doi’s deceased father during her childhood, and unfurls through a personal archive of images and reminiscences that patch together the life of this complex and reserved individual. In its quest to deconstruct the mundane, private appeal of family memories, Doi calls the film an ‘anti-home movie‘. However, in keeping with the diaristic quality of her previous works, My father Burned paints a portrait of memory for ambiguous emotions to resonate and resound.

A Wisdom Tooth | Kamioka Fumie | 1993 | 7’ | Japan

As the artist counts from 1 to 100, Fumie builds an affectionate portrait of her grandmother at her home and suggestively edits together her own youthful body against her grandmother’s ageing one; her own incoming wisdom tooth and her grandmother’s set of fake teeth, as a lyrical tribute to the passage of time imprinted on women’s bodies.

Total viewing time: 180min The looping starts everyday at 12:00 and 15:00

Drawing from Guangzhou-based practitioner Qin Dao’s 烂片 (bad film) project, this programme revisits a moment when cinema fractured into unofficial circuits of reproduction.

China’s 1980s–90s ‘video films’ sit in the overlap of bootleg markets and low-budget production. Through visual codes from Hong Kong cinema, foreign-sounding titles, and counterfeit packaging, these works mobilised disguise to navigate uneven conditions of production. Yet within these acts of replication emerged a radical visual imagination: hybrid genres, impossible storylines, and excessive fantasies that far exceeded their borrowed forms.

Originally hosted as part of The Cult Buried in Chinese Videotapemovie—Bad Film Made in China from 1986 to 1992 in Guangzhou, this programme brings together selected video films and re-assembled footage, tracing these productions as unstable copies caught between memory, repetition and disappearance.

Untitled Short | Onomatopoeia Office | 13’

Assembled from fragments of various lanpian by Onomatopoeia Office. Sketching the contours of consumer culture in 1980s China, moving between dance halls filled with pop music and video rooms operating as underground cinemas.

A Messenger from Hell 地狱来的请帖 | Lu Dongqing | 1989 | 91’ | China

An inescapable melancholy hangs over A Messenger from Hell — an 1980s story still caught in the shadows of the 1970s. The protagonist is haunted by the singing voice of his dead lover. An elderly woman follows him wherever he goes, insisting that a disaster is drawing near. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is being harrased by her former boyfriend, while her supervisor behaves strangely.

Motordisco 旋风摩托车手 | Jiang Qinmin | 1990 | 76’ | China

Motordisco possesses a kind of futuristic nostalgia: stylish youth and disco, gangsters and motorcycles. A chance encounter with a motorcycle gang's bank robbery sets off a deadly chain of events, throwing Xuanfeng and his lover into a spiral of desire, violence, obsession and pursuit.

Note: A Messenger from Hell was produced during the peak period of VHS lanpian (bad films) production in the late 1980s. While Motordisco belongs to a transitional moment when Chinese lanpian productions became increasingly polished, later circulating through VCD distribution.

Total viewing time: 60 minutes

Four artist moving-image films exploring how histories circulate through and become embedded within public space.

This programme considers how landscapes—both urban and natural—hold traces of history just beneath the surface: in the imprint of a footprint, the ghostly persistence of memory, the cracks of pavements, rocks and concrete. Traversing sites from contemporary urban development in Hong Kong to the legend of a rock in Buseok said to conceal ‘enough food to feed all of Korea’; from the communal spaces of Seward Park in New York to the Guazhou Reservoir in Guangdong, China, constructed during the Great Leap Forward era, the programme reflects on how place bears witness to histories both visible and buried.

Across four artist films, Simon Liu’s Signal 8 and Daphne Xu’s ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong explore the competing forces of violence, alienation, and the potential for community embedded within urban structures. Xiao Zhang reaches beneath the surface to examine the profound impact of dam construction through a personal dialogue with her grandmother in Words Fly Back to Black Earth, while Park Kyujae moves in a straight line of flight, from a temple to his grandmother’s house, set between a floating rock in Buseok.

Signal 8 | Simon Liu | 2019 | 14’ | Hong Kong

Simon Liu’s eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a series of strange disruptions to the city’s urban infrastructure. Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an impending hazardous event that may never arrive.

ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong | Daphne Xu | 2024 | 9’ | USA

The ping pong table at Seward Park in New York City and the in-between space of a Cold War. An immigration lawyer advises on how to tell the truth.

Buseok | Park Kyujae | 2024 | 18’ | South Korea (UK Premiere)

A man searches for memories of his family’s past, alternating between Geomeunyeo, Buseok Temple, and his grandmother’s house, all of which are located along a straight line on the map. Geomeunyeo is a rock located in the reclaimed area of Buseok, Seosan, South Korea. It was originally a reef that was exposed above sea level, but is now above ground. The name of Buseok, which means floating rock, is said to be derived from Geomeunyeo.

Words Fly Back to Black Earth | Xiao Zhang | 2025 | 19’ | China (UK Premiere)

A calling inhabits the blank pages, unfolding a secret writing of hers. The unseen written traces seep from the murmuring land, pushing through fragmented voices to become new forms, beings made material. Framed as a dialogue with my grandmother, this film explores an alternative form of personal writing by Chinese women in political shifts, absent and abundant. The ‘blank’ becomes an image, carrying a search for agency; of land transformed and of women unheard. By breaking down linguistic structures, the film opens a space for imagining, reading, and performing, allowing for emergence.

Total viewing time: 76min

Corrupt Copies, (Muted) Forms gathers a group of experimental and artist films that return to corrupted media forms to trace the latent histories and speculative connections they continue to hold.

Across state broadcasts, neglected film stocks, game worlds and algorithmic media, familiar infrastructures are inhabited from within, their logics quietly interrupted and rewritten. These works linger with the ambiguities opened up by gaps and distortions, following the muted voices and alternative political imaginaries that emerge through these ruptures.

Afternoon Hearsay | Peng Zuqiang | 2025 | 19’ | China, UK, Italy

What is a film without a camera?

China's little-known 8.75mm print format—a film stock designed for mobile projection rather than image capture, circulating across factories, villages and itinerant screening sites—forms the point of departure for Afternoon Hearsay. This work layers of archival films, photochemical experiments and super 8mm footage into a cinema of hearsay, absences and dispersed histories.

East Timorese Shapes | Pastinaca Videotapes Plantation | 2025 | 12’ | Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Switzerland

A Portuguese special forces operative known as ‘Ghost‘ entered Dili in 1998 to assist the East Timorese resistance.

Treating machinima itself as a form of found footage, East Timorese Shapes is composed from early military simulation and tactical games, collapsing digital warfare and anti-colonial history into a deliberately unstable narrative. The Song of My Life | Sadia Pineda Hameed | 2020 | 10’ | UK

The Song of My Life borrows the audiovisual language of karaoke videos and 1970s melodrama, unfolding through a missing vocal track and fragmentary images. Between what is sung, and what cannot be direcly spoken, personal memory slips into the longer afterlives of migration and interrupted lineages. Mute | Yun Eunkeong | 2025 | 19’ | South Korea

Tracing unlikely genealogies linking transistor manufacturing, military technology, Yamaha synthesizers, Adachi Masao’s radical cinema and the algorithmic revival of city pop, Mute follows the ways political images are continually reorganised through media—and what is muted in the process.

A Metamorphosis | Lin Htet Aung | 2025 | 16’ | Myanmar

For Lin Htet Aung, growing up in Myanmar, state broadcasts were a form of horror cinema—where military power came to speak through the familiar syntax of television.

A Metamorphosis transforms the broadcast into a site of haunting. Distorted transmissions and uncanny imagery conjure a counter-nightmare, while a dictator's voice returns as a lullaby.