Charlie Hill-Smith

HongAFI nominated director, Charlie Hill-Smith’s first documentary, is a telling insight into the complexities that face modern China. In 1997 the most free market city of earth was consumed by the last great communist state, but who is China? What is China? Travel from Hong Kong to Beijing to Tibet to grab a warts and all snap shot of the Middle Kingdom as it rises to become the great power of the twenty first century.

Everyone has their secrets. Everyone has the past no one’s heard about. But what makes an entire generation sit in stunned silence with unmentionable hesitation to talk about their past? Even the past was 50 years ago.  Five decades after the Hong Kong leftist riots, six ex-young prisoners speak out for the first time about their personal and unmentionable experience. Documentary film YP1967 is about their love and hate towards their country, their honour and dishonour as a convicted criminal, their condonation and condemnation of the parties involved, and their truth-seeking and reconciliation with the past.

The documentary “Not One Less” records the clash in Hong Kong Island on 31st August, 2019, and the assembly on Mid-Autumn festival night supporting protestors in custody. The protests initiated by the "Extradition Bill" has continued for more than 100 days. In this period, over 1000 citizens were arrested, a number of people committed suicide, and there are rumors that some protestors are missing. In the clash scene, protestors strive to protect their comrades from being isolated. After the clash, they still care about their comrades in custody. On the mid-autumn festival night, they sang loudly outside the Lai Chi Kok Reception Centre, to let their comrades know that they were not abandoned.

The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was once the densest place on earth, a virtually lawless labyrinth of crime, grime, commerce and hope. A Wall Street Journal documentary tracks its colorful legacy and brings the place alive 20 years later.

A poetic, experimental portrait of four Hong Kong women in London working to digitise records of the handover agreement between the United Kingdom and China. Impressionistic and precise, personal and expansive, Cheung's elegant, eloquent work decodes history and how politics are enacted.

At the forefront of most of Hong Kong's demonstrations, 'frontliners' (aka 'the valiant', yung mo in Cantonese) are the black-clad, masked, often armed youth willing to use violence against the HK government and its heavily-armed police force. Willis Ho's remarkably revealing doc approaches from the inside, giving them voices and offering understanding, not judgment.

In Hong Kong, echoes of resistance and turmoil are sensitively captured on 16mm in this poetic rumination of public spaces and everyday life in a metropolis in upheaval.

The work documented the story of Yuli, a Hong Kong domestic worker from Indonesia. She is a novelist who won a literature award and also a journalist dedicated to writing. Between the social event that happened in June in Hong Kong, her thoughts and caring about the city are far more from what people used to imagine a narrative of a domestic worker. They are not only domestic workers but they also have other social roles, e.g. a citizen who lived in Hong Kong.

A single shot, taken during a confrontation between police and demonstrators in Hong Kong's Sham Shui Po neighbourhood, transforms a street confrontation into something transcendently beautiful. The voice of Louis Armstrong adds a level of almost unbearable irony.