“we may not be through with the past but the past is through with us”: Review

“There was a lot to be excited about in this year’s East Asia Film Festival of Ireland. From Hong Kong classics to the Vietnamese Ky Nam Inn and the Chinese Shanghai Daughter, programmers Maria O’Brien and Marie-Pierre Richard put together a diverse, stimulating and political set of features. The most interesting item on the schedule, and the one I was most looking forward to, was a collaboration between the festival, the collective aemi (Artists’ & Experimental Moving Image) and Trinity College Dublin. The three institutions hosted a pre-festival screening of five short films by Hong Kong experimental filmmaker Simon Liu in TCD’s Arts Technology Research Laboratory (ATRL) on the evening of March 18th. Liu is a cinematic artist whose practice centres on the rapidly evolving psychological and sociopolitical landscapes of his homeland of Hong Kong through material abstraction, speculative history, and subversion of documentary film practices via short films, multi-channel video installations, mixed media prints, and 16mm projection performances. Hong Kong was EAFFI’s country-in-focus and Liu’s creations were a perfect way to kick off the festival. For aemi, this was a unique opportunity to build a programme around the corpus of a single filmmaker. The fact that the screening took place in what is normally a lecture theatre in Trinity was a testament to the potential of academic spaces and the brilliance that can be achieved by metaphorically expanding them. “we may not be through with the past but the past is through with us”, the title of the collection came from a fragment of text in Liu’s latest short, the 2024 Refuse Room. This film preoccupied itself with in-betweenness, in-between spaces, states and situations. The film had an in-between quality to it as well, a liminality of form as it oscillated between people, places and patterns. The other four films on the programme were E-Ticket (2019), Happy Valley (2020), Let’s Talk (2023) and Single File (2023). Each of them portrayed Hong Kong in flux, a dizzying city in sequence. More than anything, Liu breathed life into the buildings and material iconoclasm of Hong Kong, its signage, graffiti, telephone wires, etc. This materiality found space in the materiality of film itself. In manipulating the reel, Liu’s handiwork manipulated the real. It is extremely hard for an ordinary cinephile to come by artistic films like Liu’s, and it is also extremely important. I was glad that the festival collaborated with aemi and Trinity, and for a mere €5, brought these five short films together to Ireland. This EAFFI special event was an incredible opportunity to experience filmic experiments on the big screen, to experience a little bit of Hong Kong in a little bit of Dublin. Liu challenges the cinematic identity of a city, questioning its fixity in the creative canon. His Hong Kong changes by the second, and the rhythm of his films mimics the temporality of real socio-political and cultural change. The festival films that followed, Wong Tin-lam’s 1960 The Wild, Wild Rose, Peter Yung’s 1979 The System and John Woo’s 1989 The Killer, all looked for Hong Kong in the past. Liu’s present (and “presence”) was remarkably refreshing before the drowning nostalgia of the features. Although this nostalgia was wonderful, “criminally” so, it was still an act of looking back, whereas Liu’s films encouraged a look forward, into a future that is not forgetful.

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