"To head for the place you’re most afraid of is the most efficient way to get rid of your fear.”

Swiss documentarian Jacqueline Zünd frequents the distant but intimate lives of people from around the world – the insomniacs, the aged and the children – embracing their delights and disappointments, regrets and hopes, and other contrasting sensations. As these people wander along their paths of ritual, befittingly or unfittingly, they understand life anew with wisdom, dignity and vitality.

Zünd has been a critically acclaimed multi-award winning filmmaker since her debut. Her works have participated in prominent festivals including the Berlin (Germany), Locarno (Switzerland), Moscow (Russia) International Film Festivals, Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland) and DOK Leipzig (Germany) amongst others.

This programme is screening a selection of her three own directorial works and bring two films that have influenced her filmmaking. Audience members are also welcomed to join the virtual After-screening Masterclass in which Zünd will talk about the process of how she transforms intimate human subjects into film.  

Tickets are now available on POPTICKET.hk.

Programme Schedule

^Megacities has been rated as a category III film and can only be viewed by persons over the age of 18.
*With after-screening masterclass

Where We Belong

Director: Jacqueline Zünd
Switzerland | 2019 | 78' | In French and German with English subtitles | DCP | Colour

17/11 (Thu) 7:45pm

Parents split up and children are left behind with their thoughts. Siblings confide in each other’s intimate company, and the only children process thoughts and feelings in soliloquy. The film asks what it means to live in constant transition between homes and approaches five children’s realities, focusing on how fragile they are - but also how brave, smart, considerate and humourous their responses are to painfully real and volatile situations. What is important to them? What hurts them? What can they manage effortlessly? And what seems insurmountable? When non-nuclear families are still being regarded with curiosity and even stigmas, this film is a work of love, labour and openness for the children who are often neglected, and whose feelings are difficult to define.

Goodnight Nobody

Director: Jacqueline Zünd
Switzerland, Burkina Faso, China, Ukraine, USA | 2010 | 75' | In Chinese, French, English and Ukrainian with English subtitles | DCP | Colour

18/11 (Fri) 7:45pm

They are awake while others are asleep - four insomniacs in Burkina Faso, Ukraine, America and China are forced to dream awake throughout long nights. "Once my work is finished, I sit down on the stage and look at the stars. Just me alone." Confronting their daytime realities by killing time in nocturnal solitary confinement, their minds dance to their own music unheard by others. Fragments of their souls float and sink in a vast sea of concentrated silence, embracing beauty, fears, fantasies and hopes. While sleeplessness is frustrating and debilitating, these insomniacs have also turned their sleeplessness into intimate enlightenments and delightful discoveries.

Sworn Virgin (Vergine Giurata)

Directed by: Laura Bispuri
Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Albania, Kosovo | 2015 | 87' | In Albanian and Italian with English subtitles | DCP | Colour

19/11 (Sat) 2:30pm

Hana was born in a remote Albanian village that is overshadowed by alpha males. To avoid the destiny of being a wife and a servant, she appeals to the 200-year-old Kanun law and takes an oath of eternal virginity to live as a man called Mark, but he is restricted from marriage, sex and parenthood. Years go by as Mark’s unrelenting woman stirs under men’s clothes, so he travels to Italy and visit his sister who has escaped from the village. As Mark comes across other bodies, he experiences the vertigo of profound femininity. Breaking the invisible prison, s/he is here and love is near.

Avoiding traps and clichés, subdued and intricate, Laura Bispuri’s debut feature has received praises from critics and audiences. The film is an exploration inside femininity told in its thousand folds and contradictory forms.