Film Review: Flowing Stories 河上變村 (2014) - Hong Kong
Rating: 8/10
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
2025 Review Count - 57
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Tagline: A Poetic Odyssey of Roots and Displacement
Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan’s “Flowing Stories” is a documentary that feels both intimately personal and expansively universal, a tender mosaic of migration, memory, and the fragile ties that bind a family to their ancestral land. Like the river that courses through her hometown of Ho Chung, Tsang’s camera meanders across Europe, tracing the lives of villagers-turned-migrants while mourning a vanishing way of life. It is a film steeped in nostalgia, yet clear-eyed in its portrayal of the sacrifices and contradictions inherent in chasing a better future.
Tsang, whose filmography thrums with themes of wanderlust and belonging, turns her gaze inward here, anchoring the narrative in the Hong Kong village where she grew up. The result is her most emotionally resonant work yet—a lyrical ode to Ho Chung’s past and a bittersweet chronicle of its scattered present. Co-produced with Hong Kong and French collaborators (including editor Mary Stephen), the film glides between rural Hong Kong and European cities, its lens framing Edinburgh’s misty streets and Calais’ bustling Chinatowns with the same wistful curiosity as Ho Chung’s crumbling village lanes.
At the heart of “Flowing Stories” is the Lau family, neighbors whose lives mirror the diaspora of countless Hong Kong villagers. The matriarch, Lau Yu Tam-kiu, embodies resilience, her weathered hands and Hakka folk songs testaments to decades of toil while her husband labored abroad. Her children, now dispersed across France and the UK, recount their struggles with assimilation, identity, and the quiet ache of displacement. One son, Lau Kam-wah, speaks of feeling “half-Scottish” and scoffs at newer migrants who resist integration—a poignant reminder that belonging is neither static nor easily earned.
In the once-a-decade village festival that serves as a poignant centerpiece of “Flowing Stories”, the camera captures a kaleidoscope of traditions and emotions. Descendants return like prodigal kin, drawn by threads of memory that stretch across oceans. Tsang's lens lingers on the rituals—the rhythmic beats of drums, the swirl of incense, the laughter that echoes through the village square. It is a moment both timeless and transient, a fleeting reunion that underscores the inexorable march of time and change. Through these evocative scenes, the film weaves a tapestry of belonging, loss, and the enduring power of shared history.
Tsang’s intimacy with her subjects grants the film its warmth; these are not anonymous interviewees but childhood friends, their candor disarming. Yet this closeness occasionally blurs the film’s focus. While the Lau family’s stories are compelling, the narrative threads—spanning generations and continents—threaten to unravel under the weight of their own abundance. Tsang, appearing onscreen as both guide and participant, her voiceovers veering toward sentimentality. The result is a documentary that feels less like a structured argument and more like a family album: vivid, heartfelt, and occasionally disjointed.
Still, “Flowing Stories” dazzles in its quieter moments. Cinematographers Jam Yau and Lee Kai-ho draw haunting parallels between the mist-shrouded hills of Hong Kong and the stark beauty of European landscapes, suggesting that home is less a place than a patchwork of memories. A scene of Mrs. Lau tending her garden, her hands caked with soil, mirrors her son’s meticulous prep work in a French kitchen—a subtle nod to the generational trade-offs between tradition and ambition.
Bulldozers loom at Ho Chung’s edges, foreshadowing a future where a Shaolin temple will supplant ancestral fields. Tsang mourns this erasure without sermonizing, letting the villagers’ stories—of resilience, regret, and reluctant adaptation—speak for themselves.
“Flowing Stories” may lack the narrative tightness of Tsang’s other works, but these are eclipsed by its humanity. This is a film that lingers, like the echo of a folk song or the scent of damp earth after rain. For all its melancholy, it is ultimately a celebration—of the tenacity of roots, the fluidity of identity, and the quiet heroism of ordinary lives. (Neo, 2025)
First watched at the 38th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2014 and revisited on DVD in April 2025.