Shorts:
Ghosts of Diaspora

A series of documentary and experimental films that trace lesser-known histories of migration and injustice still echoing today through archival gaps, urban myth and ghost stories.

Runtime: 99min

​

Tales of Chinatown 中国城轶事

Dir. Luka Yuanyuan Yang / US / 2019 / 19min

The film opens with a walking tour in San Francisco Chinatown: walking into the last surviving theater following the scene from the 1940s film “Lady from Shanghai” directed by Orson Welles; wandering from “Shanghai Low” to “Forbidden City Nightclub” – the camera follows the pace of Chinese American nightclub dancer Cynthia Yee, historians Wylie Wong and David Lei onto a journey across time and space.

​

When the Sea sends forth a Forest 直到海里长出森林

Dir Guangli Liu / France / 2020 / 21min

“It was 1974, war had lasted for years…” So begins the memory of an old Chinese man who lived through the regime of the Khmer Rouge. Guangli Liu’s film is a collective imagination of that lost history based on propaganda videos and the disaster videos which spread throughout the world after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Narrated through the autobiographical voice, a tender, personal history unfurls as a virtual reality of an imagined recent past.

​

In 1875 We Met At the Docks of Liverpool 1875 於梨花埠遇上

Dir. Yarli Allison / UK / 2021 / 19min

By the turn of the 20th century, Pitt Street near Liverpool’s lively docks saw a multicultural mix of migrant workers, the old Chinatown disappeared after the bombings of World War II and the sudden forced repatriation of Chinese seamen, leaving their British and Irish wives, partners and children behind. Using oral history, interviews, census data, digital mapping and virtual reality, and working with queer performers, Allison rebuilds the lost Chinatown of Liverpool as a digital landscape with imagined inhabitants’ daily lives: making visible these forgotten diaspora Histories.

​

Train Song

Dir Zhao Yanbin / US / 2022 / 3min

Surrounding a hidden monument honouring Chinese migrant workers, alongside a railroad located in Canyon Country, California, Train Song uses reflective material to distort the image of the railroad as an approach to conjuring the unseen spirits of the seemingly tranquil landscape. calling for remembrance of Chinese-American works through a meditative audiovisual experience.

​

An Asian Ghost Story 九龙东往事

Dir. Bo Wang / Hong Kong, Netherlands / 2023 / 37min

A cinematic and conceptually inventive film that explores the haunting memories of

Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past. Departing from the moment of the communist hair ban, through stories of movement, diaspora and migration, this project examines the role of Hong Kong as a transient space that mediates the connection between different worlds.

​