Many Undulating Things
film | 125min | 2019

A Film by Bo WANG and PAN Lu

Colonial air, native plants, botanic empire, segragation, entrepôt, steel-and-glass, shopping malls, memories, laissez-faire, ghost houses, speculation.... many undulating things.

 

Festivals and Screenings
2021 Festival International du Film d'Architecture et des Aventures Constructives, Bègles/Bordeaux
2021 The Body and the City, Hong Kong Arts Centre
2020 The (In)hospitable World, Asian Film Archives, Singapore
2020 Thursday Cinema, SALT, Istanbul
2020 Int'l Competition, Arkipel: Jakarta Int'l Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Indonesia
2020 New Narratives Film Festival, Taipei
2020 Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Perth, Australia
2020 An Impulse to Turn, Inside-out Art Museum, Beijing
2020 Sundays for Hong Kong, Berliner Festspiele, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany
2020 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece
2019 Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
2019 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, Hong Kong
2019 Asiatica Film Festival, Rome
2019 fARAD Documentary Film Festival, Arad, Romania
2019 Asian Competition, DMZ Int'l Documentary Film Festival, Goyang, South Korea
2019 Open City Documentary Festival, London
2019 Compétition Internationale Burning Lights, Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland
 

'A riveting essay-film on Hong Kong past and present that takes the form of a bitter-sweet love letter that never arrives because the city's hungry ghosts devour it along the way.'

- Ackbar Abbas

 

'... a powerful geopolitical essay that shows how our materialities are always ideologically, economically, and historically inflected.'

- Laura Rascaroli

 

Synopsis
The film begins and ends in a shopping centre in Hong Kong. We carefully observe the smooth movement of the escalators, the constant flow of people that never stops, the musical fountain that presides over the centre of the internal courtyard, as if this gigantic complex could concentrate the circulation of the entire city, or even, the entire country. From there, it will be more a tale about concrete, enormous port warehouses, glazed galleries built for universal exhibitions, overpopulated tower blocks, the fragments of still recent colonialism... Through the history of urban changes, we witness the profound social transformation of this territory that is constantly swinging between the East and the West. Hong Kong thus emerges, like an archetypal space of many other cities of globalised capitalism. Many Undulating Things offers a complex reflection on the relationships between landscape, nature, urbanisation and society. Thanks to its exhaustive approach, the film questions the function of cities in the development of the capitalist system. A political poem.

- Elena López Riera, selection committee, Visions du Réel 2019

 

Productions
KIM Kyungmi (BÖC Features Production)
PARK Chi-Hyun (Ulsan MBC Co-production)

*More information to be updated soon.