Enoch Cheng

In 2015, an actress is casting for a sci-fi disaster film set in 2003. Dialogues in the audition jolted her memories when she recalled being a stand-in actress on one fateful night in 2003. “Were such memories once real? Or is it just a story?” she doubted. People in front of her looked oddly familiar, overlapping with people she encountered from the past. In this short, the actress experiences the mystical passage of time, but no one is sure if it is forward or backward. At this very moment, could she be simply playing a role from the past?

China’s internal economic migration through the dislocated people, creating the cities of the future.

Just Like Snakes is a reinterpretation of the popular Chinese folklore The Legend of the White Snake. In the traditional story, a white snake transforms into a woman and falls in love with a man. When a monk discovers their transgressive romance, he punishes the snake by imprisoning her in a pagoda. This tale has been celebrated across Asia for centuries, evolving to reflect the changing morals of each era. Commissioned by CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) in Hong Kong, Just Like Snakes responds to the city’s first Chinese musical based on the same legend, created by the iconic Chinese diva Rebecca Pan. Through music and dance, the film questions the limitations of story archetypes. Revisiting the folklore as a metaphor for contemporary society, it proposes: now that the pagoda—representing restrictive societal constructs—has collapsed, how might we observe and adapt to a shift in paradigms that calls for new orders in our world today?