Trista Ma Ka-Yue

The pendulum of life swings both ways, relentlessly and callously and the only certainty is its evanescence. A bonesetter treats patients from all walks afflicted with bone ailments and returns home at night to a hoarding attic and an unresponsive partner. His orderly world is thrown into disarray one day by a bizarre vision of the skeletal variety. A health freak receives a sudden call in his exquisitely furnished harbour-view bachelor’s pad that will send his life into turmoil. Inside a swanky apartment on the peak, a woman savours the slow passing of solitary time at the breakfast table, nursing a fateful idea between contemplative bites. Depicted apart though it could as well be superimposed or intertwined, these characters delve into a multiplicity of experiences, whether lived or imagined, in which every element perpetuates the cyclical motion of being.

Panning from a tour guide testing his microphone, to tourists deciding on a cafe, to a camera operator hurriedly scouting for locations, this comedic single-take filmed from a rooftop in Kowloon City, Hong Kong, moves between rehearsed, reenacted, real, and all the way back again. Who’s watching who, and if everyone is both watching and performing, who gets to frame the truth?