Interview With Lo-Ting: An Oral History Project
2022 · 15m · Hong Kong
Directed by Chu Ka-shing
Genres: documentary, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Yu is a university audiovisual communication student who wants to shoot a documentary about her grandfather, who suffers Alzheimer's; the grandfather tells the story of his deceased beloved and affirms that she is a legendary creature: Lo-Ting.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make a film about memory loss right now—Lo-Ting subverts that by having the grandfather's mythology *deepen* as his mind frays, which is genuinely weird and cuts against the tired 'dementia as erasure' narrative that usually wins festivals.
Chu Ka-shing situates this work in a lineage of essay-documentary hybrids and East Asian cinema's engagement with oral tradition and family archive, and the formal rigor of letting the audio history *structure* the visual composition—rather than illustrate it—marks a considered and deliberate hand.
The decision to let the grandfather's voice and mythmaking carry the film rather than cutting between present confusion and past clarity could've been sentimental, but the restraint in the visual design—letting his words build Lo-Ting for us—is the specific choice that transforms this from earnest student doc into something genuinely moving.