Chronicles of Melancholy: The Film "Island of Melancholy" and the Exploration of Identity in Hong Kong

What is Hong Kong to you?

And who is "you"?

//"Island of Melancholy" uses re-enactment techniques to create time travel and identity transformation, as if looking for clues from the past. Although the people in the film are very different, they are all thinking about what Hong Kong is in their respective eras. and imagining Hong Kong’s future. Some people use China to define the future of Hong Kong. Some people's Hong Kong is the paradise of freedom. Some people's Hong Kong is part of democratic China. Some people's Hong Kong is an independent world that can no longer be discussed publicly today. And they all paid the price for imagining Hong Kong's future. Our thinking about our identity may be connected by race, or shaped by changes in political power, our understanding of values, shared memories, imagination of regions and communities, or by oppression and suffering. In the process of traveling through different time and space, and the transformation of actors and roles, I hope to show the differences in the imagination of several people of different generations in Hong Kong. At the same time, it also runs through the accumulation of people from different generations because they are unable to dominate or influence the future of Hong Kong. The layers of melancholy piled up. //

                                                                                                   ——Chen Zihuan (director of "Island of Melancholy")