Mok Chiu-Yu
Directing
Biography
Mok Chiu-yu (Hong Kong, born 1947) is a filmmaker, writer, translator, and educator who has been involved in social activism since the late 1960s. A co-founder of 70s Biweekly magazine, Mok has been active in people’s theatre and is also a long-time advocate for disabled communities.
Known For
Ordinary Heroes is a narration about the life stories of an advocate, a prostitute, a social worker, and a priest during the social movements from 1970s to 1980s in Hong Kong. The film is based upon true stories.
Ordinary Heroes
Student rebels, labor organizers, Trotskyites, anarchists, sojourners in Paris, and human rights activists are the cast of real-life characters featured in THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WU ZHONG XIAN. Based on a stage play, this DV feature traces the poignant trajectory of a rebel whose dream of world revolution first landed him in battles against British colonialism in the 70s, and later on his deathbed in the mid-90s, in agonies over the uncertain fate of a revitalized China. Revealing a little-known chapter of rebellion and idealism, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WU ZHONG XIAN is a timely, resonant docu-drama for today's Hong Kong, China, and our ideologically-disillusioned era.
The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian
Lai Yan-Chi's short film 1+1 triumphed at two prominent short film awards in Hong Kong, namely Fresh Wave and IFVA. She multiplies the sentiment in 1+1, by N times maybe, to come up with her debut feature-length fictional film N+N. The wise grandpa and witty granddaughter from 1+1 continue to bless the city with bamboo shoots, while their own home in a rural village is torn down to give way for the high speed railway. They meet other people also jeopardized by the so-called development: artist left homeless because of factory revitalization, the middle-class striving for a living, the young generation born in the 1990s... They are all trying to hold on to the city's collective memory and every living tree.
N+N
Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong is a 35mm film that utilised and appropriates footage from a documentary Henry Moore exhibition in Hong Kong, through over-dubbing, painting directly onto the film and other gestures, Mok turns the material into an incendiary address to Hong Kong's youth. Intercut with newly filmed material creates, the film also functions as a personal diary of Mok's political activity throughout the 1970s.