26 September – 3 October 2026
Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns for its fourth edition from 25 September to 4 October in London, presenting reflective and shape-shifting cinema from Hong Kong, the wider Asian diaspora and beyond, marking the start of a more year-round festival.
This year’s programme foregrounds diaspora as agency — behind the camera, on screen and between communities. Across contemporary and historical cinema, artists’ moving image and interdisciplinary art practices, the festival moves through questions of migration, colonisation, activism and gender. Together, these works reshape ideas of memory and community.
Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns for its fourth edition from 25 September to 4 October in London, presenting reflective and shape-shifting cinema from Hong Kong, the wider Asian diaspora and beyond, marking the start of a more year-round festival.
This year’s programme foregrounds diaspora as agency — behind the camera, on screen and between communities. Across contemporary and historical cinema, artists’ moving image and interdisciplinary art practices, the festival moves through questions of migration, colonisation, activism and gender. Together, these works reshape ideas of memory and community.
Programme
26 – 27 September 2026
In Focus: Mary Stephen
Mary Stephen is a Hong Kong-born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor, best known for her over two-decades-long collaboration with Éric Rohmer, and later with various other directors including Ann Hui. This year’s HKFFUK spotlights Stephen’s career as a director as much as an editor, opening the festival with her latest film, Palimpsest: The Story of a Name, an archival quest into her family history.
30 September 2026, 6.30pm
I Heard That They Are Not Going To See Each Other Anymore + Q&A
Playful, quirky, and poetic, Ka Ki Wong’s first feature transforms the streets of Taipei into a kaleidoscopic lucid dream, probing the relationship between connection, memory, and pain through the intertwined stories of her characters, whom the filmmaker interviews, leaving us unsure whether the answers are coming from the actors themselves or from the characters they play.
1 October 2026, 6.15pm
Inherited Movements, many migrations + Discussion
This programme traces experiences of migration across different times and places – people who arrived in Hong Kong, and those who later left it for the UK – allowing conversations around home and identity to unfold from narrative cinema into documentary and artist moving images. Beginning with the perspectives of women filmmakers, we move across borders and geographies, following the ways in which people leave, return, adapt, and take root again.
3 October 2026, 1.15pm
I am fine, thank you. + Panel Discussion
I am fine, thank you. documents the stories of Hongkongers who migrated to the UK after 2019, as each gradually settled into a new life in the country while finding their own way to connect with memories of the homeland.
3 October 2026, 6.30pm
Remanence: The (Un)erasable - Moving Image+ Lecture Performance
A programme of experimental documentary, artists’ moving image and lecture performance explores voices as both fragile and impossible to fully erase. Traces endure as bodies, images and technologies become sites where histories and memories are reactivated against systems that seek to silence them.
26 – 27 September 2026
In Focus: Mary Stephen
Mary Stephen is a Hong Kong-born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor, best known for her over two-decades-long collaboration with Éric Rohmer, and later with various other directors including Ann Hui. This year’s HKFFUK spotlights Stephen’s career as a director as much as an editor, opening the festival with her latest film, Palimpsest: The Story of a Name, an archival quest into her family history.
30 September 2026, 6.30pm
I Heard That They Are Not Going To See Each Other Anymore + Q&A
Playful, quirky, and poetic, Ka Ki Wong’s first feature transforms the streets of Taipei into a kaleidoscopic lucid dream, probing the relationship between connection, memory, and pain through the intertwined stories of her characters, whom the filmmaker interviews, leaving us unsure whether the answers are coming from the actors themselves or from the characters they play.
1 October 2026, 6.15pm
Inherited Movements, many migrations + Discussion
This programme traces experiences of migration across different times and places – people who arrived in Hong Kong, and those who later left it for the UK – allowing conversations around home and identity to unfold from narrative cinema into documentary and artist moving images. Beginning with the perspectives of women filmmakers, we move across borders and geographies, following the ways in which people leave, return, adapt, and take root again.
3 October 2026, 1.15pm
I am fine, thank you. + Panel Discussion
I am fine, thank you. documents the stories of Hongkongers who migrated to the UK after 2019, as each gradually settled into a new life in the country while finding their own way to connect with memories of the homeland.
3 October 2026, 6.30pm
Remanence: The (Un)erasable - Moving Image+ Lecture Performance
A programme of experimental documentary, artists’ moving image and lecture performance explores voices as both fragile and impossible to fully erase. Traces endure as bodies, images and technologies become sites where histories and memories are reactivated against systems that seek to silence them.
