Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong

Original format: 35 mm

Renowned for his theatre work, activism and as the founder of the influential left-wing magazine The 70s, Mok Chiu Yu is one of Hong Kong's defining iconoclasts. In the 1970s and 1980s Mok produced a highly original and unique body of film work, eschewing the production methodologies of popular Hong Kong film industry and addressed to Hong Kong's under-represented Left, his films cut and paste elements of industrial, personal and experimental film, resulting in highly original and invaluable records of anti-imperialist and intellectual movements in British-controlled Hong Kong. Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong is a 35mm film that utilised and appropriates footage from a documentary Henry Moore exhibition in Hong Kong, through over-dubbing, painting directly onto the film and other gestures, Mok turns the material into an incendiary address to Hong Kong's youth. Intercut with newly filmed material creates, the film also functions as a personal diary of Mok's political activity throughout the 1970s.