The database is still under construction and will constantly be updated. A link to the archive catalogue will be added at a later stage. Search the film archive for the film title, director or the year it was made.
Many Undulating Things
PAN Lu, WANG Bo
Release year: 2019
Run time: 125 minutes
Film type: Experimental
Synopsis
Many Undulating Things is a meditative film essay on Hong Kong's urban evolution, from British colony to Chinese SAR, viewed through Watsuji Tetsurō's spatial history in Fūdo. Four chapters—""Water demon,"" ""Night air,"" ""Ferro-Vitreous,"" and ""Land""—trace water's flows, colonial disease theories and racial segregation via botanic gardens, steel-and-glass commerce rooted in imperial botany, and capitalist land inequities in malls, cage homes, and speculative ghost spaces. Mixing present-day scenes with archival footage, the film uncovers colonialism's lingering ties to race, science, hygiene, and capital. A shifting male voice blends observation and narration, dissolving boundaries between documentary and poetry, intimate and distant.
Director biography
Bo Wang, born in 1982 in Chongqing, China, is an accomplished artist and filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. His works have graced prestigious institutions like the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, as well as prominent film festivals worldwide—Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Image Forum Festival, and DMZ Docs, to name a few. Wang’s talent has earned him 13 awards, including recognition from the e-flux Film Award, CPH:DOX’s New:Vision Award,
the Golden Dove Award at DOK Leipzig, and the Award for Excellence at the Image Forum Festival in Tokyo.
(bo-wang.net/home.html)
PAN Lu is Associate Professor in The Department of Chinese History and Culture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics in Cultural Studies, with a focus on visual culture, city, media and memory. As a filmmaker, she directed Many Undulating Things (2019), Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017), Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (2016) with Bo Wang, Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia (2021) with Yu Araki and her independent work Island Fever (2026). She was one of the curators of Kuandu Biennale, Taipei, 2018. (https://pan-lu.com/)
