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.… Read the rest