Palimpsest: The Story of a Name

Spanning eight decades and four continents, this searching first-person documentary follows Hong Kong–born filmmaker Mary Stephen on a personal investigation into her English surname—an effort to uncover the dissonances and the contradictions in her heritage. The film traverses a turbulent period in China’s past marked by the fall of a fading dynasty, civil war, Japanese invasion, and the eventual rise of the Communist Party. Against this backdrop, Hong Kong under British colonial rule emerges as a paradoxical space where Western modernity collides with Eastern heritage. Drawing from her father’s home movies and diaries, family photographs, her own travel footage, fragments of oral history, and official archives, Stephen constructs a layered, polyphonic narrative where personal memory and collective history converge.