May 17 – 19:00
The Garden Cinema
Hong Kong and Switzerland, 2020
Directed by
Kit Hung
Running time
107 minutes
This screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with director Kit Hung, moderated by Victor Fan.
The film is based on an autobiographical treatment by Julian Lee, a celebrated Hong Kong photographer who, in 2008, was diagnosed with peritoneal carcinomatosis and needed to wear a stoma. For many patients, this is a necessary life-saving procedure. Nonetheless, for Lee, who enjoyed anal intercourse with other men, the removal of his bowels was effectively a form of castration. This idea is often difficult to understand even by many gay men today, as our cis-gender male queer culture focuses so much on the penis as the sole source of sexual pleasure. The film treatment was Lee’s last piece of fiction. It painfully recounts his eight years of struggle with cancer and to find new meanings to his own self and to his sexuality.
Kit Hung is always fascinated with how queer East Asian men live with and work through their struggles with subjectivity, agency, and desire through cross-border and inter/intra-cultural kinships. In his films, memories are often fantasies. Hence, within each moment of pain and suffering, there lies a question: ‘How can I – or we – do this better in the future?’ In a way, memories are always reconstructions, and the sequence of events in the film represents less about what actually happened than what could have happened, how I would have wanted it to happen, or how I wish I had done it differently.
– Victor Fan
Meet the director
Kit Hung is a filmmaker from Hong Kong and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Migrant Futures Institute, Goldsmiths, University of London. Working across filmmaking, research, and teaching, his practice focuses on migration, queer lives, memory, and cross-border storytelling.
His films have screened internationally, and his work explores intimacy, displacement, and belonging through fiction, experimental, and socially engaged forms. Alongside his creative practice, he develops research-led and community-based projects that examine how vulnerable stories can be told with greater care, ethics, and protection.
His practice sits at the intersection of filmmaking, critical inquiry, and social impact. Kit is the founder of the Secure Storyteller Network (SSN), an initiative that supports filmmakers and storytellers working in sensitive contexts through training in digital security, consent-led practice, and risk-aware production. His work has been recognised by the Yale-China Artist Fellowship, the Berlinale Talents MasterCard Enablement Programme, and the Deutsche Bank Awards for Creative Entrepreneurs (DBACE).
Meet the cast and crew
Starring
Michael Wai-Man Chan
Derek Tsang
Yiu-Sing Lam
Stefan Kollmuss
Sing Lam
Writers
Kit Hung
Julian Chi-Chiu Lee
Editor
Kit Hung
Producers
Chow Keung
Liliane Ott
Cinematographer
Raquel Fernández Nuñez
Camera and electrical department
Caspar Brog
Prentice Sinclair Smith
