Clara Law is often introduced as part of the ‘Hong Kong New Wave,’ although she refuses to be defined by territorial labels, a form of categorisation she continually challenges throughout her body of works. Born in Macau, raised in Hong Kong, and now based in Melbourne, Law—like many of her characters—is perpetually in motion, crossing national borders and cultural boundaries, making the sense of displacement in diaspora a recurring theme in both her life and work.

This retrospective charts the turning points in her career, beginning with They Say the Moon Is Fuller Here, her rarely screened first feature, made while studying film in London after directing drama programs at the Radio Television Hong Kong. Returning to Hong Kong in the 1990s, Law emerged as a rising filmmaker with Farewell China, the first instalment of what became her ‘migration trilogy’. In 1994, she moved to Australia with her partner and long-term collaborator Eddie Fong, and gained recognition at major festivals with Australian-made films, including The Goddess of 1967. In her latest work Drifting Petals, she revisits Macau and Hong Kong, reflecting on her personal ties to both cities. Some of the films are shown for the first time in the UK.

If you have come across Qiu Miao-jin’s writing, it wouldn’t be difficult to notice the pronounced presence of cinema in her works. Qiu is known for her distinctive diaristic, confessional style of writing, in which the introspection of characters is often mediated by film. There are extensive references to films and filmmakers in her books: Francesco Rosi’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, quotes from Andrei Tarkovsky, and many more. Some chapters are even dedicated to reflections on particular films.

In Last Words from Montmartre, Qiu’s narrator recounts the ecstasy she experienced watching Theodoros Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players at the Centre Pompidou:

During the four long hours of the movie there were a number of tedious, awkward scenes that made it feel like political propaganda, but there were also some serenely tender and astonishingly beautiful scenes as well. I was wholly attentive for the first three hours before I started to yawn, but then, for some unknown reason, laughter burst from deep within my body—just suddenly burst out…. Life is so beautiful! (28)

Not only did Qiu profess her love for cinema through the cinephilia of her protagonists, her writings are often delivered in the form of screenplays, as in Notes of a Crocodile, where the protagonist uses Derek Jarman as her alias and describes scenes from his film The Garden:

The scene cut to the seaside. A bathtub was floating in shallow waters. Someone wearing a white mask was reclining inside, their body cloaked in a white robe. The bathtub was lined with holes into which bouquets were stuffed. (Note: That part of the video had been lifted from The Garden.) (241)

These words were written as if she were behind the camera, orchestrating every frame that unfolded on screen.

Bonnie Huie, the translator of the book, said she “immediately recognized the interdisciplinary nature of her writing, which assimilates the theory behind auteur cinema, where one’s style can essentially be expressed through formalism, including the sequential and rhythmic arrangement of images,” during her first read of the novel.

Qiu’s works are inherently cinematic. Yet few people know that she was also an aspiring filmmaker in real life.

In his memorial piece about Qiu, the cinematographer and co-writer of Ghost Carnival, Lin Hsu Wen-er, shared his experience collaborating with her and mentioned that she had plans to study film in Paris. Later, we learn that instead of film, she continued her studies in psychology and feminism, becoming a student of French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous.

Made in 1991 and adapted from her eponymous short story, Ghost Carnival was recently digitised from its 16mm original negative by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. After its international premiere at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2022, the film gained popularity on the European festival circuit, screening at least three times in London alone within a year. Nevertheless, few seem to note that she also wrote and directed another film, Guide Me to Sleep, a 23-minute short about a man struggling with insomnia. The exact production year remains unknown. The only available copy was on VHS, and unfortunately its quality was severely degraded—viewable only in low resolution with grinding background noise and flickering lines on screen.

This latter film has never been publicly screened and circulates solely through fragments included in Evans Chan’s documentary The Love and Death in Montmartre. Nonetheless, it is clear that filmmaking was a creative avenue Qiu was passionate about and eager to further explore. Thirty years since her passing, we gather to celebrate her artistic achievements across literature and moving image.