HKOS Shorts Showcase
>> Festival Home / Shorts Program
ENG | 港
This shorts showcase represents a cross-section of curated and open call works the HKOS team assembled to present exciting new voices and perspectives from both emerging and student filmmakers engaging with the Hongkonger experience in the international city-state and abroad. Traversing various genres (arthouse, experimental, documentary, horror, drama) and aesthetics, it demonstrates the sheer variety and expansive terrain filmmakers and artists are working in beyond the commercial cinema space and government sanctioned machinery.
Three Rivers for A Fish
2022 | 10 min | Dir Antonia Olivares, Angeles Osuna
Synopsis:
A bored, young Chinese woman wanders the streets of Hong Kong until she encounters a goldfish that reminds her of the nonsense of a cyclical life. As she goes through a journey into the cycle of water and her past lives, she begins to understand that lethargy and catharsis are necessary to achieve calm.
By 3pm
2022 | 23 min | Dir Kaiu Choy
Synopsis:
Feeling oppressed in a post-2019 Hong Kong, Cheung Yuk Fan resigns from her job as an arts administrator and rents a flat in a subdivided unit in an industrial building. Determined to lead a more solitary lifestyle as she starts remote work running her online store, she finds her peace (and perhaps, her mind) disturbed by the beautiful sound of piano playing next door.
Victoria, Tentatively
2017 - 2022 | 13 min | Dir Kwan Q. Li
Synopsis:
Time has never been settled in post-colonial Hong Kong, even its raison d’être Victoria Harbour seems to be a namesake debt. The slipperiness of temporality is accentuated in this experimental short through its complicity between a dance documentary and a dance film. In its very own time-image form, this film concluded the series of attempts from the artist to visualise a plurality of abstract time conditions (waiting, spectating, rehearsing, performing) against uncertain moments of the city.
Sunny Side Up
2020 | 23 min | Dir Wendy Jane
Synopsis:
Online content creator Zozo, reeling from her recent breakup with boyfriend Lok, struggles through depression triggered daily by her consumption of internet violence. As Lok attempts to lure her out of her solitary state, they both confront the existential and political questions related to euthanasia.
The Outlanders - From HKG to SEA
2022 | 11 min | Dir Azure Kwok
Synopsis:
After the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong, a young Hongkonger chose to leave her hometown and made her way to Seattle. She talks about how this decision marked a pivotal turning point in her life.
Blue Hour
2019 | 11 min | Dir Sam Ip
Synopsis:
11th June, 2019: a food delivery driver’s first night on the job.
Kaho is a single father working part-time after hours. Faced with an unfamiliar interface, his 11 year-old son Sixo takes the lead: a hard reflection on tech advancement, or simply a man who just can’t keep up with the times? One motorcycle and two food deliverers complete their orders through mishaps, and end up lost as the long night wears on. At the end of the shift, father and son meet again to a sky ready for a new day, as they brave their next destination on the highway.
After The Riots, Before The Liberation
2020 | 15 min | Dir Chung Hong Iu
Synopsis:
Shot in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, this essay film captures the urban landscape of graffiti on walls, unscrewed railing, bricks, respirators, safety goggles and various objects of everyday life positioning them as historical witnesses and inserting them into a dialectic between different narrators. Utilizing Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and the French Nouvelle Vague’s political cinema grammar and its penchant for equivocation as resistance, it hopes to glean at the truth of the matter.
That Spring, In the Sky of H-Ville, There Was
2022 | 9 min | Dir Chung Hong Iu
Synopsis:
Reinterpreting Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic sci-fi noir, Alphaville for a post-2019 and COVID-19 pandemic lockdown Hong Kong, this essay film critiques the increasingly fraught government response to this global health crisis amidst the escalating political tension between pro-democracy forces and Chinese government control. Like its antecedent, in the ultimate fight between the fascist machine and man’s humanity, love will always guide us into the light.
White Night
2020 | 21 min | Dir Chow King Kan Kingston
Synopsis:
Tin On moves from Hong Kong to Taiwan suddenly in January 2020. She finds out the light in the apartment seems to be broken. The landlord asks her neighbor, Yi Ming, to fix it. Tin On seems far away from her reality. Yi Ming gets closer to her to uncover the mystery of her presence.
Night is Young
2020 | 26 min | Dir Kwok Zune
Synopsis:
Since June 2019, Hong Kong has turned a new page. Political violence, protests and police brutality filled the city. This film is about a night shift experience of a taxi driver amid the social unrest.