Palimpsest: The story of a name (隱蹟之書：重寫自我)
Director – Mary Stephen – 2025 – France – Cert. – 108m
*****
Exploring her family history, Hong Kong-born Mary Stephen delves into the mystery behind her surname being British rather than Chinese – plays at the Barbican as is the opening film of the UK’s Hong Kong Film Festival which runs from Friday, September 25th to Sunday, 4th October at various venues
The director narrates her film in the first person, talking about the fact of her father’s name being Henry Stephen on his birth certificate, while her mother retained her Chinese name on the document. Mary Stephen herself was born in Hong Kong in 1953, the same year as Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in Britain. Archive images of Hong Kong from that year show a strange dislocation, with images of the new English monarch jostling side by side with Chinese words on buildings. A British built clock tower looks strangely out of place.
She worked for years with celebrated New Wave director Eric Rohmer as his editor. His name, too, was a palimpsest.
Her father died and was buried in Canada in 1979, alongside her mother. When the family first moved there, she was a teenager. Going to a posh English school, her parents couldn’t see their daughters, despite their surname, being treated by their classmates as immigrant Chinese.
According to her father’s comprehensive diaries, in which he made daily entries, and which he had transcribed into the third person by his company employees, her grandfather and great grandfather were from Australia, and of Aboriginal descent. Her mother told another story, that he was adopted by a Catholic priest in Australia. The whole history seems shrouded in mystery.
He seems to have been adopted by the Chan family when his birth mother returned to Australia. But Mary and her siblings went under the Mongolian surname Syut, not Chan. Their father met a Miss Yik, married her within a month, and shortly afterwards was working on the construction of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, where his surname appears for the first time as Stephen.
Also weaving through the film is the story of another Stephen family, England’s Bloomsbury Set, the sisters Vanessa and Virginia who renamed themselves Vanessa Bell (the painter) and Virginia Woolf (the writer). Vanessa’s son Julian spent time teaching English at Wuhan University and Mary’s extensive research discovers a convoluted connection with her own mother, which she surmises must be where the Stephen surname originated in her own family.
Her guesswork turns out to be exactly that – a guess, a set of assumptions which may or may not be historically accurate, just like many of the elements in this extraordinary film essay,
The family’s photograph albums stopped during the Fall of Hong Kong (the Japanese Occupation), although her father kept his journals going, recording various events and tragedies of the period. The family’s home movie reels started to appear in 1949.
Like Orson Welles in his F for Fake (1973), Mary admits to twisting the facts a little from the truth for her own mythmaking purposes. In the closing minutes, a visit to her fifth uncle reveals a very different version of the family history from the one with which we’ve previously been presented.
It’s an extraordinary film, a essay into a personal family history unearthed piece by piece over many years. The nature of that history shifts as different sources are unearthed which shed new light and tell very different versions of the story. And it makes for compelling viewing.
Palimpsest: The story of a name plays at the Barbican as is the opening film of the UK’s Hong Kong Film Festival which runs from Friday, September 25th to Sunday, 4th October at various venues.
Full Festival programme and tickets → hkff.uk
Trailer: