Writer and Director: Mary Stephen
Identity, in its rigid formulation, is largely a Western construct. In Asia, and arguably across other non-Western regions, identity is far more porous and resistant to easy categorization. Consider Ho Chi Minh, the architect of modern Vietnam and America’s archenemy during the Vietnam war: he adopted anywhere between 50 and 200 names and pseudonyms throughout his life—including female personas—to evade authorities and safeguard fragile political movements. It is not politics alone, however, that dictates this multiplicity of names in Asian cultures. Rather, to adopt, change, or build upon the name you were born with (if you were, in fact, fortunate enough to have one) is considered common practice in certain cultural environments. It is precisely this ontological divide between Western and Asian concepts of the self that Mary Stephen reflectively explores in her film.
The way Stephen begins this exploration is by delving head-first into the emotional whirlwind of not knowing who her parents really were—not due to their physical absence, but because they actively concealed the truth of their past. Starting from this unsettling premise, Stephen’s 108-minute autobiographical documentary interrogates the mysterious origins of her family’s Western surname, asking one relentless question: How did a couple of entirely Asian descent come to adopt and pass down an unmistakably Anglophone name to their children? The fact that Stephen eventually became the preferred film editor for Eric Rohmer, and that she cut several of his celebrated Moral Tales, makes the film doubly compelling, even though the events leading up to this fact are left unexamined in the documentary itself. And neither should they be: this lineage allows her to infuse her genealogical investigation with a touch of the French New Wave master that makes her family portrait compellingly self-reflexive.
To be sure, the story centered on Mary’s father, Henry, can be slow at times, mainly due to the repetitive nature of the investigative process. But the audience’s patience is rewarded in the end with a revelation that transcends family trivia, offering profound cultural insights that will resonate with anyone invested in the dynamics of East-West cultural differences.
Stephen relies heavily on an abundance of archival home movies, which offer a wonderful, rare glimpse into both colonial Hong Kong and historical China. She complements these with what she aptly calls the “unexpected landscape” of private journals left behind by her family—which were apparently written together by her parents—and which describe, in painstaking detail, almost every day of their lives from 1907 until her father’s death. This takes us on a bewildering journey through the Japanese invasion of China and Hong Kong, the Chinese cession of the island to the British, and the director’s own coming-of-age years in the British colony. Crucially, the narrative does not shrink from the stark realities of war, famine, and deprivation, nor does it leave out Henry’s love for Western cinema—hence the home movies. It also gives a glimpse into Henry’s mysterious internal conflict and speculates on why Henry fabricated a highly dubious Australian biography for himself—a striking paradox, given that his devotion to the Chinese cause was strong enough to compel a 2,000 km journey to Beijing to join the anti-Japanese campaign.
Be that as it may, the intimate home movies are vital for clarifying the parents’ profiles. What we see in them is a couple not only in love with the Hollywood extravaganzas of the day, but thoroughly intoxicated by Western culture. Stephen intimates that this infatuation, in fact, bordered on the denial of her parents’ own Chinese heritage.
In postcolonial theory, cultural critic Gayatri Spivak utilized the concept of the subaltern to describe marginalized populations whose histories are erased by colonial hegemony. Displaced individuals frequently engage in the willful erasure or distortion of their own identities to assimilate, a process that breeds traumas destabilizing entire cultures. Speaking from within the intersection of her heritage and her craft, Stephen notes, herself a product of both Asian and Canadian cultures, that “the ghosts are not pacified,” wondering why she feels compelled “to embrace those who have been speaking from a self-appointed higher cultural and moral ground?” More pointedly, she asks, “Why does our work, our art, our science, have to be validated in a Western festival, an Occidental institution, before we give it the value it deserves?”
Conversely, one can view this phenomenon through a more liberating lens: an assertion that human existence does not require a rigid, individualistic Western framework to achieve validity. But reality is often less forgiving: What remains mind-boggling in Stephen’s account is not merely that colonialism wiped out traces of local histories but that some colonized subjects willfully deleted or deformed their identities to fit the colonial mold. The true eccentricity of Henry and his wife’s psychological state lies in the fact that they did not alter themselves to blend into a physical Western environment at first, but rather to inhabit an Occidentalized fantasy of their own creation—a fictitious world that existed solely within their own minds.
This remains the fundamental tragedy of the migratory experience: a pervasive sense of dispossession and perpetual displacement (vividly captured by Stephen’s uncle, who calls Henry a “nomadic wanderer”) that leaves the individual permanently fractured. Of course, such an identity only registers as “incomplete” when measured against the dominant, homogenizing metric of the West. It is this exact cultural friction that Mary Stephen so adroitly balances in her familial portrait, illuminating a psychological phenomenon so nuanced that much of Western film and cultural criticism has yet to fully comprehend.
Palimpsest: The Story of a Name is screening at the Hong Kong Film Festival 2026 from 24 September-4 October.
