A rich and expansive film essay in many forms, Many Undulating Things explores contemporary Hong Kong through its history of urban change. Formerly a British colony and now a Special Administration Region in China, Hong Kong has been passed back and forth between imperial powers of East and West for centuries. Through a forensic examination of its unique urban topography, filmmakers Bo Wang and Pan Lu shift the form of their film to draw connections across time, finding in the ghost houses, shopping malls, convention centres and skyscrapers of the capitalist present remnants and residues of a colonial past.

In partnership with The Essay Film Festival

UK Premiere

Followed by a Q&A with co-director Bo Wang, hosted by Matthew Barrington, Manager of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Read an essay on Many Undulating Things by Steffanie Ling

“Nominated for the Open City Award Bo Wang is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. His works have been exhibited internationally, including venues like Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, Garage Museum Moscow, Image Forum Festival , DMZ Docs, CPH:DOX, Times Museum, BOZAR, among many others. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at ACC-Rijksakademie 2017-2018 as well as NTU CCA in 2016. He teaches in Visual and Critical Studies, School of Visual Arts, New York. Pan Lu is a filmmaker and scholar based in Hong Kong. She received her PhD from Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong. Previously, she studied in Shanghai and Bayreuth in literature and cultural studies. Her current research interests include visual culture, urban space, war memory and theories of aesthetics. She teaches Chinese-language cinema, literature and cultural history as an assistant professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.”