Fresh Wave is Back: What It Means to Filmmakers

No one doubted Hong Kong’s film industry was small. Even when it was cranking out upwards of 300 or 400 features each year, at its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was a small sector when held up against real estate or banking. For proof, look no further than a video call one evening ahead of the 19th Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival in December. 

As Canice Tam Kai-yin logs on to talk about her film, she’s told she will be joined by Bobby Yu Shuk-pui. She responds with a pleasantly surprised exclamation: “Oh, I know Bobby! We made a short film together eight years ago.” When Yu appears a few seconds later, they greet each other like old friends. “We have a long history. When I was still in Hong Kong, I was an actor and she was on a crew,” she says. The scene repeats the next day, when Kristie Ko Sze-yeuk and Erica Kwok Chung-yee both nod knowingly when told that Yu and Tam send their regards. “We follow each other on Instagram, but we haven’t met in person,” says Kwok.

Needless to say, it’s a small community — especially when it comes to filmmakers making shorts, a format experiencing something of renaissance in Hong Kong. That comes thanks in no small part to the Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival, which is back for its 19th edition with entries from Tam, Yu, Ko and Kwok. Fresh Wave filmmakers are emerging directors but not always first-timers: Yu is a 17th Fresh Wave winner (Lykke Til), Ko participated in the 15th (Ateh) and worked on Amazon’s Expats, Kwok wrote the 14th’s Mo, and her short She is Calliope screened at HKAFF this year, and Tam has produced and art directed other participating films. 

The result is a month of some of the most sophisticated work coming from Hong Kong’s under-the-radar artists. For this year, 23 shorts in six programmes will be part of the festival, opening with Vietnamese director Trấn Thành’s Mai, a filmmaker that transitioned form shorts to features and demonstrates Fresh Wave’s mandate, and culminates with the Local Competition Awards Presentation Ceremony on December 20.

It’s also some of the most personal and introspective filmmaking of the year of any length. The festival’s thematic programmes include “Happy Together,” “The Family Game” and “Distant Voices Still Lives.” Yu’s Whispers in the Belly is in “The Young and the Damned,” films interrogating generational identity; Tam’s Last Dream is part of “Cruel Story of Youth,” examining the lingering impact of trauma: and Ko’s Homecoming and Going and Kwok’s 28 are together in “Stranger than Paradise,” whose films explore displacement. 

Four short films

Oslo-based Yu stars as Ling in the autobiographical Whispers in the Belly, in which a woman returns to Hong Kong from Norway with her boyfriend only to have her visit dredge up buried resentments that suddenly need to be reconciled. Yu’s own family plays her family on screen, when all of them come together in therapy; shooting the film felt like going through that process all over again. It became a way Yu could reckon with her own complicated relationship with her family.

Whispers is a nuanced film with meta elements, formally switching between a direct cinema documentary tone and wide screen narrative cinematography by Leung Ming-kai. “I don’t think anyone can play [my parents’] characters except my parents,” says Yu, which is why the film is a family affair. “I wanted to blend fiction and documentary,” she says. “In the script there’s not much [dialogue] in the therapy scenes, and so when I told them, ‘No, you guys are just going to talk with someone,’ they realised it would be about real shit.” She admits she took advantage of this to get the kind of family introspection she suspected she’d never get otherwise. It made the editing process very painful; she had to constantly hear her mother saying “I’m so sorry” as she reviewed the footage. “But eventually it started to feel nice. I needed that apology for a long time.” 

In Tam’s film, Last Dream, the ghost of a girl who died young wanders random sleepers’ dreams and one evening encounters a woman who she thinks she may have known in life. The dreams force her to reconcile her past. For Tam, it was a way to acknowledge her grief as well as memorialise a high school friend who took her own life a few years ago — and a period in life. The title is appropriate; Last Dream has the unfocused fluidity and soft edges that dreams and memories do.

“I really thought about how to visually present that,” she says. “Of course I know this time and these people are never coming back, so I wanted to create a filter for the audience, so that it feels like they’re in a fantasy and walking through memories. What you see is not just a dream, it happened, but it’s been fading for a long time.”

Hong Kong is an unseen character in both Ko’s Homecoming and Going and Kwok’s 28. Homecoming and Going follows two friends as they swap tenancy of a London flat; one is arriving from Hong Kong and the other is heading back. Ko describes her film as “an attempt to understand why I came back to Hong Kong at the end of 2019,” after having lived for eight years in Los Angeles and the UK. “A lot of people asked me why, and I didn’t know how to articulate that feeling.” 

The script was born shortly after Ko worked on Expats. During reshoots of that series in Los Angeles, Ko would show co-star Bonde Sham (who stars in Homecoming) around the city she used to call home. “She’d ask all these questions and it made me see the city in a new light,” she says. “I felt like it was a very full circle moment, and that experience kind of kickstarted me to writing this. Even though it’s set in London, it’s kind of an amalgamation of all these different times I’ve uprooted myself.” In the film, the characters tool around the city in a reflection of Ko’s own bittersweet journey.

28 is more transient, unfolding in a perceived safe space for the displaced, Berlin, and chronicles fellow Hong Kong travellers Moon and Anna’s search for stability and home in a co-living address under threat of closure. They become unlikely activists and allies. The film was inspired by Kwok’s experience backpacking in Berlin in 2017. At the time, she learnt of the city’s history of co-living and squatting, and the entrenchment of its image as a haven for artsy communities. As 28 points out, though, that haven isn’t guaranteed. 

“I am trying to explore displacement and belonging, but also the tension between idealism and reality,” says Kwok. “Berlin is seen as a place of freedom but for many newcomers, especially immigrants, I think life there can be very uncertain, very unstable. So I wanted to capture that kind of emotional complexity, of having a temporary home where nothing really feels permanent.”

It takes hustle

Looking past Fresh Wave, all four women admit to being in various stages of development on a feature — from just journalling story ideas (Tam) to active scriptwriting (Yu). But all agree it comes down to time and resources; all four earn a living working in other areas of production, and none feels part of an industry just yet. Filmmaking is more akin to a community struggling with content and funding challenges yet somehow soldiering on — issues that apply everywhere. 

“I don’t think any of us can afford to be full-time filmmakers,” says Ko. “My bread and butter is commercials and branded content. That’s how I pay rent, and that was also how I funded half this film. As grateful as we all are to Fresh Wave, it wasn’t enough. Usually, whatever funding you get, is almost never enough. I think that’s our job as creatives, as filmmakers, to work around [challenges] and to push those limits.” 

Yu is staying in Oslo for the foreseeable future, but tips her hat to her peers here. “I have to say, as a creative industry, Hong Kong has more urgency than Nordic Europe. We all have more to respond to, and we have more urgency to express ourselves.”

The future of Fresh Wave

Though Ko, Tam, Kwok and Yu’s films will soon hit the screen, there were fears that Fresh Wave wouldn’t even happen this year. The festival’s vice chair, filmmaker and critic Shu Kei says Fresh Wave had to reckon with a “financial adjustment”; there were also fears the films’ content was being scrutinised enough to end the event entirely. (Several films have been censored in recent editions, after Hong Kong imposed more stringent censorship rules in 2021.) Whatever the case, in his programme statement, producer-director and Fresh Wave chair Johnnie To Kei-fung noted that waves crash onto shore and ebb away just as quickly, but always return. Which is what the 19th edition of the funding competition and showcase has done. 

Nonetheless, it begs the question: is the festival still relevant? Shu thinks it is. “Over the past nearly two decades, a considerable number of new directors who released their feature debut in Hong Kong [have come] from Fresh Wave,” he says. Among directors alone are newly minted Golden Horse best director Jun Li (Tracey), Tam Wai-ching (Someone Like Me), Sasha Chuk Tsz-yin (Fly Me to the Moon) and Wong Chun (Mad World). “We think that providing production subsidies for new talents and granting awards for remarkable short films can continue to nurture more young people and bring about development in the film industry.”

Developing talent and providing platforms for new voices is all well and good, but Ko is far more pragmatic about Fresh Wave’s role in Hong Kong’s cinema ecosystem. “I don’t think it’s that complicated. If there is funding, we are applying wherever there’s an opportunity. We’ll be knocking on that door,” she says with a chuckle. 

Average observers may have barely noticed Fresh Wave’s possible demise, but Ko points out filmmakers were holding their collective breath. “We all thought, ‘Oh no, it’s not coming back,”” she says. And so it was very big relief to see that call for submissions pop up. “What I can say for my script, at least, is it was written in 2022 and it took three years, four different pitch programmes where I had gotten to maybe a finalist stage, and countless more that I submitted to and never heard back. Whether it’s a short or a feature as an indie filmmaker, you just have to keep trying.”

The 19th Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival runs 5 to 28 December 2025. Click here for more information.