HKIFF Review: Palimpsest: The Story of a Name 隱蹟之書：重寫自我 (2025) - Hong Kong / France / Canada / Taiwan
Reviewed at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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A Family Album, Written in Ghostly Ironic Ink - There's a moment early in Mary Stephen's “Palimpsest: The Story of a Name” where you see an old home movie footage of her mother Hilda, writing a letter in good humour, within a Hong Kong flat, and the next shot we see the Uluru representing the myth of Aboriginal Australians and the possible connection. A palimpsest, indeed.
Stephen, who spent decades cutting films for Éric Rohmer, knows something about what lurks between frames. So when she turns her editor's eye on her own family's century-old mystery—why do these Chinese people answer to "Stephen"?—she doesn't just find an answer. She finds a wound.
The question seems simple enough. Her father, Henry, carried a British surname though he was born in Canton. No English blood. No adoption. Just a name that didn't fit, worn like a borrowed coat. Stephen tracks it through colonial records, immigration manifests, the brittle pages of diaries. But the real excavation happens in the home movies. She treats that 16mm footage the way a detective treats a confession: every frame holds a lie, and every lie holds a truth.
Watch how she cuts between a sun-drenched garden party and a cramped tenement kitchen. Watch how the laughter of children in one shot bleeds into the silence of her father's diary entries in the next. This is Rohmer's editor at work—lyrical, patient, devastating.
Henry Stephen emerges as the film's quiet heart. He was a man who "edited" himself, Stephen suggests. He learned which accent opened which doors. He learned that Henry traveled better than his birth name. He learned that survival in British-governed Hong Kong meant becoming a footnote to someone else's story. The film doesn't judge him for it. It does something harder: it understands.
By the end, Palimpsest isn't really about a name anymore. It's about every immigrant who has ever folded themselves into a smaller shape to fit through a door. It's about the stories we write over our own histories, hoping the original text won't show through. But it always shows through. That's the ghost in the frame.
Mary Stephen has made a film about erasure that refuses to erase. About forgetting that remembers anyway. About a father who changed his name, and a daughter who loved him enough to ask why. Sequel awaits with the mythical Aboriginal bloodline. (Neo, 2026)