aemi are delighted to partner once again with East Asia Film Festival Ireland (EAFFI) to present ‘we may not be through with the past but the past is through with us‘, a collection of four short films shot in Hong Kong by the widely celebrated experimental filmmaker Simon Liu. This screening will take place at 6.30pm on Wednesday March 18th at TCD’s Arts Technology Research Laboratory (ATRL) on Pearse St, Dublin 2.

‘we may not be through with the past but the past is through with us‘ is a phrase taken from Simon Liu about his most recent short film, Refuse Room (2024). Along with his three other films in this programme, Refuse Room captures a Hong Kong struggling against a tide of political and ideological change, resisting concession while confronting the reality of widely enforced oppression. Simon Liu is a master filmmaker, producing sequences and effects that betray as much of an eye for  intimate detail as for dizzying spectacle. There is no speech featured here outside of a series of familiar songs distorted almost beyond recognition but conflicting voices of the city are everywhere in the form of official signage, protest placards, street murals and graffiti. Adept at capturing crowds through the remnants they leave behind, this is a cinema of superimposition and flickering lights, one that marks the will of a people as much as it surveys the forces that attempt to keep that will in check.

FILM INFO:
Simon Liu, E-Ticket, Hong Kong/U.K./U.S., 35mm to Digital, Sound, Colour, 13 Minutes, 2019
Simon Liu, Happy Valley, Hong Kong, 16mm, Sound, Colour, 13 Minutes, 2020
Simon Liu, Let’s Talk, Hong Kong SAR/U.S., 16mm, Sound, Colour, 11 Minutes, 2023
Simon Liu, Single File, Italy/U.S./U.K./Hong Kong, 35mm, Sound, Colour, 10 Minutes, 2023
Simon Liu, Refuse Room, U.S./Hong Kong SAR, 16mm, Sound, Colour, 10 Minutes, 2024

E-Ticket
E-Ticket is a frantic re-cataloguing of a personal archive and a vehicle for the re-birth of forgotten images. 35mm still photographs are obsessively tape-spliced together, one frame at a time, in evolving rhythmic patterns – views shift between a school trip to India and culminate in documentation of a violent 2005 protest at a World Trade Organization summit in Hong Kong. A re-telling of Dante’s Inferno for the streaming age; freedom of movement reserved for the modern cloud.(notes from Simon Liu)

Happy Valley
British Colonial-era structures overlook scenes in the aftermath of civil unrest as Hong Kongers work to retain some semblance of normality. The sound of petty arguments from local TVB soap-operas of the 80s are put in concert with captive animals, political graffiti and desolate highways. Suspension cables and ship anchor lines reveal a fragile urban anatomy; the structures that keep the city moving along. As civic functions grind to a halt, the limits of our empathy and control come into question. As the days teeter toward an uncertain future, HAPPY VALLEY cinematically probes the role of the so-called “little things”. A rendering of the perseverance of spirit in Hong Kong – an attempt at irony that can’t help but be emotional.(notes from Simon Liu)

Let’s Talk
On the 25 year anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Great Britain to Mainland China, directives for “a new era” promising stability and prosperity are found on murals and public slogans. Meanwhile, uneasy thoughts cast unusual shades on daily life. Old feelings arise, a pressure builds – conjuring distant voices from the concrete, never quite getting their point across. Something calls for repair but we can’t just talk it out can we? (notes from Simon Liu)

Single File
In the wake of cataclysmic regional change in the artist’s homeland of Hong Kong, Simon Liu’s Cinema-Strobo-Scopic film features a laborious sequence of analogue darkroom practices and dense shrouds of video processing techniques which actively work to both conceal and reappraise approaches to personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide – a new linearity is in need of; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors. Sifting through new realities of misinformation, digital consciousness, and cultural disappearance, “Single File” seeks new lexicons of disobedience through formal experimentation. (notes from Simon Liu)

Refuse Room
Oscillating from moments of togetherness to disappearance, rising and falling, dwelling and fleeing, regret and acceptance, Refuse Room surveils spaces and beings during fragile in-between states in a desperate attempt to find pathways forward within altered landscapes. We may not be through with the past but the past is through with us. (notes from Simon Liu)

“Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu’s Refuse Room captures Hong Kong’s architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.” – NYFF

SIMON LIU BIO
Simon Liu (b. Hong Kong, 1987) is an artist filmmaker whose practice centers on the rapidly evolving psychological and sociopolitical landscapes of his homeland of Hong Kong through material abstraction, speculative history, and subversion of documentary cinema practices via short films, multi-channel video installations, mixed media prints, and 16mm projection performances. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Biennial 2024, Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The Shed, PICA, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Museum of the Moving Image, Everson Museum, Moderna Museet, “Dreamlands: Expanded”, and the M+ Museum.

His films have screened at festivals globally including the Toronto, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh, Jeonju, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals alongside the Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel, Punto de Vista, Viennale, and the Media City Film Festival. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s Quadruple 16mm Projection Highview, along with other recent works, for their Permanent Collections. He is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.