What’s in a Name? Hong Kong-Born Filmmaker Mary Stephen Finds Out

Mary Stephen is the filmmaking legend you may never have heard of. The Hong Kong-born editor, writer and director immigrated to Montreal with her family in the late 1960s and grew up there, eventually studying at Concordia University (Loyola College at the time) under renowned multidisciplinary artist Charles Gagnon. In the 1970s, Stephen relocated to Paris, where she still lives, and met director Éric Rohmer, with whom she started a 30-year partnership when she wasn’t directing her own films. 

And despite her surname, Stephen is 100 percent ethnically Chinese. In 2026 that may seem like a draconian way to introduce an accomplished artist, and if not draconian at the very least, inappropriate and outdated. But in some ways a life of hearing, “But where are you really from?” or being greeted with surprise from banktellers that can’t — or won’t — reconcile her name with her face has led Stephen to her latest documentary, Palimpsest: The Story of a Name, which screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) in April after a string of well received stops in Toronto, Taipei and Amsterdam. 

Palimpsest taps into the shifting concept of identity and place that Stephen has made a career making films about. “Shifting identity is the kind of thing that I’ve had to deal with all my life, without it being a major issue,” she says. “Whether I was in denial or not, I don’t even question that anymore, but the fact that even now, when I go to teach in China for example, fellow professors or colleagues who’ve seen my name for a long time will meet me for the first time at dinner and say, ‘Oh, I thought you were married to a Stephen.’ And I don’t know whether my status just went down.”

Stephen has spent a lifetime navigating the world with multiple identities and the expectations that come with them. The layering came early too: Stephen was an immigrant Hong Kong Chinese kid in an English school in French Canada. She’s had time to consider the issue. “Canada is better, but if I’m in Europe, in terms of the littlest details, they look at, say, my bank book, they look at me and a lot of time just assume I’m married — which is another connotation again. So there are all these shifts and if you’re too sensitive then it gets crazy.”

Those shifts are also the foundation of Palimpsest. For lack of a better word, Stephen is a jovial presence who seems entirely unfazed by the fact that she’s been locked in a hotel room for hours, sitting for interview after interview during HKIFF to talk about her body of work in one of its filmmaker spotlights. Per the Cambridge English dictionary, a palimpsest is “a very old text or document in which writing has been removed and covered or replaced by new writing,” and it is the perfect title for Stephen’s latest deep dive into identity and memory: Palimpsest is a work of excavation.

A Hong Kong Canadian in Paris

Stephen’s communications studies at Concordia gave her access to an exchange programme that took her to Paris. She’d already started dabbling in filmmaking with her shorts Labyrinthe, The Great Canadian Puberty Rite and A Very Easy Death (1973–1975); she dropped out to make the landmark Shades of Silk in 1978, a hypnotic consideration of memory and time based on Marguerite Duras’s India Song. But she wanted to stay in Paris, particularly after sitting in on classes with Rohmer. 

At the time, Rohmer was one of the last of the Nouvelle Vague directors to make a splash, notable for My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and for being editor of Cahiers du Cinéma between 1957 and 1963. When Rohmer told Stephen his regular editor, Cécile Decugis — who worked on Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless — needed an assistant on his next film, she pivoted to film editing. “It turned out to be my calling,” she says.

Stephen worked with Rohmer on three of his Four Seasons films (1990 to 1999) among others, and eventually it led her back to Hong Kong as a consultant for indie filmmakers around the region, on docs by Fan Lixin (Last Train Home, 2009), Du Haibin (1428, 2009) and Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan (Flowing Stories, 2014), and features such as Freddie Wong Kwok siu’s The Drunkard (2010), Amos Why’s Dot 2 Dot and Napping Kid (2014, 2018), Ann Hui’s Our Time Will Come (2017) and the anthology Septet: The Story of Hong Kong (2022).

The seed for a documentary investigating how Stephen got her discordant name was planted nearly 20 years ago when she was researching British poet and Wuhan University instructor Julian Bell; she was also reading through her father Henry Stephen’s 100 old journals. She set all of it aside until the Covid pandemic gave her more time to really dig into the personal archive, which also included 8mm and 16mm films and photographs, and revisit the Bell biographies that touched on his relationship with a Wuhan professor’s wife, Ling Shuhua. It just so happens Bell was the nephew of Virginia Woolf, whose maiden name was, notably, Stephen. On top of all this, Stephen’s fellowship at the Camargo Artist Residence in Cassis inspired even greater reflection on how best to weave this story into an engaging tapestry; Cassis was famously Virginia Woolf’s summer home. 

Stephen realised that, “sentimentally and emotionally,” it was the right time to finally plunge into the story of her name. “And everyone has passed away,” she wryly notes. “There’s no one to argue with me.”

In the editing room

As Stephen describes it, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Palimpsest came together during its two-year editing process. “I can only conceive of a film when I’m cutting,” she states, admitting that one of her aims was to give her mother a voice that would finally be heard above her charming, gregarious father. The sheer volume of material made it a tricky task, and she’s quick to concede frequently struggling with self-censorship. 

“I think the past is best left asleep,” she says. She only read her father’s first two journals, and a portion of those he wrote during World War II. “I flipped through some of the others and I thought, ‘I don’t need this.’” 

As the story stitched itself together, however, Stephen found herself surprised by her father’s history on more than a few occasions. “In spite of everything, somehow looking at all this and putting it all together, I realised that I’m truly my father’s daughter and that I’m a storyteller,” she says. 

Part of the process was also reckoning with uncomfortable truths. Stephen notes children often have ambivalent feelings about their parents, and in her case, “People [didn’t] express things, and there’s a lot of emotional and physical violence in the family, in the household,” she says. “Nobody talks about it. The takeaway from the film already is that you live your own life, and at a certain point you have to shut the door on the past and make [your] own myth.”

Palimpsest is constructed almost like a mystery thriller culled from a rich trove of evidence. Stephen needed to hire an editing consultant — “A me for me,” she says — to help her see the big picture. Spanning 80 years and weaving together Hong Kong, Australia, Canada and France, the film digs into how Chan Tik-fong and his wife Hilda Yik became Henry and Hilda Stephens, and explores how culture, race and colonial legacy shape us — and make us want to reinvent the self. 

At the risk of sounding trite, the less knowledge of Palimpsest one has going in, the more rewarding and enlightening its discoveries. It is a meticulously constructed deconstruction of how Henry Stephen invented himself for a Eurocentric world, equal parts infuriating, heartbreaking and entirely relatable. Palimpsest speaks to a universal mood regardless — or perhaps because of — the film’s specificity. Stephen is tackling a name that has coloured her life, but the film’s fundamental message could apply to anyone who’s had an identity ascribed to them. It’s not much of a leap to the trans woman fighting external demands, the need to “sound white” or any type of code-switching many of us do in order to fit into the prevailing picture more easily. 

Did Stephen expect it to resonate quite as much as it does? “No,” she states immediately. “Quite honestly, I was making the film in a kind of bubble. I never expected it to go out in a big, public kind of way. I always thought of it as a conversation at night with a close friend; it’s very intimate. I’d never thought of resonating with anyone else, and I still don’t know who would look at it.”

And in the years since she started digging, did Stephen ever consider reclaiming her father’s original surname, Chan? “Yeah, I did,” she says, after pausing for reflection. “But it’s so drab.”

Palimpsest: The Story of a Name opens on June 18.