The Cinematheque

“A haunting lyrical elegy … bracingly committed to formal invention.”

Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Shot over five years and self-funded by wife-husband duo Clara Law and Eddie Fong, Drifting Petals, slipping amorphously between fiction and nonfiction registers, is a ghostly meditation on histories personal and political. Inspired by German literary figure W.G. Sebald’s impressionistic use of memory, the DV-captured film, handheld and periodically juddering into focus, floats abstractly across time and space, narrated by an unseen woman (Law) who, on occasion, assumes the POV of the camera. Her friend, a classical pianist (Jeff Lai), has returned to Hong Kong in the aftermath of anti-PRC protests. His feelings of dislocation blur into the narrator’s childhood memories of Macau, where, in a parallel present, she is haunted by a boy—or spectre—resembling her vanished brother. (Law was born in Macau, and her eldest brother died when she was young.) A work of ​“alternate cinema” by their own description, Law and Fong’s handcrafted movie is their most formally experimental and soul-bearing yet.

In Cantonese with English subtitles

Best Director
Taipei Golden Horse Awards 2021

Virtual Q&A with Clara Law and Eddie Fong on January 24.

“Poignant and poetic … A personal project that springs directly from the depths of their creative hearts, shot using minimal means.”

Rotterdam IFF 2022