
Dorothy Cheung
Directing
Biography
Dorothy Cheung (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and artist from Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through a double perspective - personal and political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works are internationally exhibited in Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) and EYE Filmmuseum, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa. She has also received commission from M+ (Hong Kong), British Council (Hong Kong/UK), Jumping Frames Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival (Hong Kong) and Visual AIDS (US).
Known For

They are frozen in place, stagnating without any direction. Around them, things change rapidly.
Pseudo Secular

Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.
Heart Murmurs

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.
Home and a Distant Archive

A letter transgresses the boundary of inside and outside, reflected in images of repurposed prisons in the Netherlands.
Letter to the Outsider
Dreaming in Another Language (2024) dir. Dorothy Cheung
Dreaming in Another Language
An experimental film reflecting on the notion of queer memories, and the failure of it through rediscovered footage taken in a journey with an ex-partner.
A Room of Oblivion

Reverberation is an experimental film that centres on Yau Ma Tei—a district in Hong Kong that was home to various independent art and cultural spaces in the 2010s and was also where the filmmaker began her practice. By overlapping new and archival images, the film delves into layers of memories to capture complex emotions about this district as well as the city as a whole.
Reverberation

As a bird that briefly perches is a cinematic diary that weaves together the filmmaker’s sentiments about homeland with reference to the geology of Hong Kong; an analogy between human nature and greenhouse gardening; and her reflections on the choice of living abroad as she studies the everyday life of migrant farmers and their adaptation on foreign soil, reinterpreting agricultural processes and the migration of species. The work explores the implications of rooting, re-rooting and growing as the artist contemplates on the evolving dynamics between land and human.