Film Review: Winter Chants 冬未來 (2023) - Hong Kong
Rating: 9/10
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
2025 Review Count - 58
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Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan’s “Winter Chants” opens like a quiet prayer—a plea for connection in a world fractured by distance. The Hong Kong documentarian, returning once more to her ancestral village of Ho Chung, crafts a film that is both a requiem for tradition and a tender ode to resilience. What begins as a chronicle of the village’s once-in-a-decade Taoist “Tai Ping Ching Chiu” festival—a vibrant, weeks-long celebration of ritual and community—morphs into something far more profound under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is a work of aching beauty, a film that asks: What binds us to a place when the threads of time and circumstance fray?
Tsang’s 2014 documentary “Flowing Stories” laid the groundwork here, capturing the festival’s 2011 iteration as a tapestry of diasporic voices—villagers who’d migrated abroad but returned, like homing birds, to honor their roots. “Winter Chants” initially seems poised to follow suit, with early scenes of village elders planning the 2020 festivities. But fate intervenes. Borders close. Quarantines isolate. The pandemic strips the event of its communal heartbeat, reducing grand processions to hushed, masked gatherings. Tsang’s lens shifts focus, zooming in on absence itself as a character: the empty chairs of overseas relatives, the muted drums that once thundered with life.
The film’s power lies in its intimacy. Tsang trains her camera on those left behind: a Filipino domestic helper, herself an emigrant, preparing to leave Hong Kong for good; twin brothers clinging to tradition by publishing a grassroots newspaper; elders whose weathered hands arrange ritual offerings with precision, as if clinging to routine might ward off the void. These figures, often unnamed, become everyfaces of a global loneliness. In one devastating sequence, villagers huddle around a laptop in a dimly lit square, their faces illuminated by the cold glow of a Zoom call. Relatives trapped abroad pixelate into spectral presences, their voices tinny echoes across continents. It’s a moment that transcends Ho Chung, speaking to anyone who’s ever longed for a touch, a voice, a home just out of reach.
Tsang’s approach here is less explanatory than elegiac. Where “Flowing Stories”
anchored itself in ethnographic detail, “Winter Chants” drifts like smoke from a censer. Snippets of conversation—about family, belonging, the ache of displacement—float over images of deserted village lanes and half-empty altars. Her own narration, wistful yet restrained, weaves personal reflection with broader existential queries: “Is home a place, a memory, or the people who are no longer there?” The question feels particularly urgent in Hong Kong, a city grappling with its own identity amid political upheaval and an exodus of residents.
Technically, the film is a marvel of understatement. Tsang’s compositions balance the sacred and the mundane—a close-up of incense spiraling into darkness, a wide shot of villagers dwarfed by mist-cloaked hills—while editor Mary Stephen stitches scenes together with a rhythm that mimics ritual itself: repetitive, meditative, quietly urgent.
“Winter Chants” is not without hope. Amid the melancholy, Tsang finds flickers of defiance. The twins’ newspaper, filled with local lore, becomes a lifeline. Elders insist the festival must go on, even stripped to its bones. “Tradition isn’t about spectacle,” one murmurs. “It’s about showing up.” And so they do—masked, distanced, but present.
In the end, Tsang offers no easy answers. Home, she suggests, is as fragile as it is eternal—a chant carried on the winter wind, disappearing even as it lingers. This is documentary filmmaking at its most humane: a mirror held up to our collective longing, and a reminder that sometimes, the most profound stories are those of what’s missing.
Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan’s “Winter Chants” is not merely a documentary; it is a quiet elegy for a vanishing way of life, a meditation on the fragility of tradition in a world that races toward the future with little regard for the past. Like her 2014 film “Flowing Stories”, Tsang returns to Ho Chung Village, her ancestral home in Hong Kong, to chronicle the Tai Ping Ching Chiu festival—a 300-year-old Taoist ritual performed once a decade to bless the community. But this time, fate intervenes in the form of a pandemic, turning what might have been a vibrant celebration into a somber reflection on loss, belonging, and the quiet resilience of ordinary people. (Neo, 2025)
Winner of Best Documentary at the 20th Neo Hong Kong Film Awards 2024
“Neo’s Recommended List of 2024 Hong Kong Movies”