Documentary: Gaze & Reflection – MulanIFF2025

Author: Jane Hui WANG

In this year’s Documentary Programme, four filmmakers from their unique angles and with deep humanistic concern, paint three intimate pictures of the challenges and struggles of the Chinese people in our modern consumerist society. In Nest and Obedience, director QIN Xiaoyue and WONG Siu-pong focus on a specific space, a cramped apartment in downtown Shanghai and the neighbourhood of Hung Hom in the centre of Hong Kong respectively, to capture the vulnerable microcosm of the underclass in society. Meanwhile, in Many Undulating Things, directors WANG Bo and PAN Lu string together a series of seemingly unrelated elements to explore historical and sociopolitical reasons behind why Hong Kong has become what it is now. The film’s unconventional narrative, together with its meditative, unhurried pacing, reminds us of the unique beauty of modern Chinese prose: “flexible in form but condensed in spirit.”