Single File

Single File

2024 · 10 min · ★ 7.0 · Documentary

In the wake of cataclysmic regional change in the artist's homeland of Hong Kong, Simon Liu’s Cinema-Strobo-Scopic film features a laborious sequence of analogue darkroom practices and dense shrouds of video processing techniques which actively work to both conceal and reappraise approaches to personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide - a new linearity is in need of; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors. Sifting through new realities of misinformation, digital consciousness, and cultural disappearance, "Single File" seeks new lexicons of disobedience through formal experimentation.

Directed by Simon Liu

Your Rating

Make it a double feature

18m together

Single File

Star Ferry

Both from Simon Liu.

More from Simon LiuSee all →

Family Affairs

Family Affairs · 1994

MovieComedyDrama

Traditional values and modern ideals clash when an old-fashioned father and his playboy son cannot see eye to eye in this honest look at the sometimes fragile father, son relationship

Highview

Highview · 2017

Personal moments are lost in film cuttings or disappear into a coloured fog only to suddenly reappear in a new constellation. This is the visual richness of Highview: four, partially overlapping, 16mm images that fully coalesce into a colourful abstract painting, but also often create a narrative as an exploded montage.

Star Ferry

Star Ferry · 2018

Impressions of Hong Kong and Tokyo by day and night shot entirely with a 35mm still camera. Star Ferry is structured between moments of stasis and frenetic movement, drawing out tensions between abrupt passages forward past neon signs and LED advertisements to quiet observations of personal rituals.

Donkey Riding

Donkey Riding · 2014

This past summer I spent a month in Hong Kong with my family in the house I grew up in.

Harbour City

Harbour City · 2015

A view through cracks between fish markets and high-rise buildings; urban imagery of Hong Kong and the indulgence of domestic life. Hong Kong's hyperactive fish market in overwhelming colors.

Sneyd Green

Sneyd Green · 2018

It’s any day, any year in the house of Alan and Vera Ellis in their Post-Industrial English conurbation formerly known for their world renown pottery industry, yet this week they are interrupted by their 16mm camera toting grandson. This year's spring is one of moving, dancing, and gliding more softly and with greater awareness. Conceived as a ditty and presented with an orchestra of loved ones, Sneyd Green is a handmade exploration of positive and negative space in concert with past and present yearnings.

Signal 8

Signal 8 · 2020

MovieDocumentary

Simon Liu's eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a series of strange disruptions to the city's urban infrastructure. Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an impending hazardous event that may never arrive.

Happy Valley

Happy Valley · 2021

MovieDocumentary

In Hong Kong, echoes of resistance and turmoil are sensitively captured on 16mm in this poetic rumination of public spaces and everyday life in a metropolis in upheaval.

Devil's Peak

Devil's Peak · 2022

In the hyperkinetic multichannel video installation Devil’s Peak, Simon Liu surveys the psychogeography of Hong Kong as a feverish dreamscape, activating charged sites of recent civic upheaval, personal heritage, and postcolonial legacies.

E-Ticket

E-Ticket · 2019

A film sixteen thousand splices in the making. E-Ticket is a frantic (re)cataloguing of a personal archive and an opportunity for rebirth to forgotten images. 35mm photographs and moving pictures are obsessively cut apart, reshuffled then tape spliced together inch by inch in rigid increments. My photographs may have all been cut up and mixed around, but at least they’re all in one place now. A retelling of Dante's Inferno for the streaming age; a freedom of movement reserved for the modern cloud.

Fallen Arches

Fallen Arches · 2018

Global in scope but intimate in spirit, Simon Liu's Fallen Arches is a dizzying assembly of footage shot between the bucolic English countryside and buzzing metropoles New York and Hong Kong.

Shuffle Cove

Shuffle Cove · 2015

Harmony (n.) a consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity. Forgive my nerves— rattling of my subjective coloring and inverted subjects! With a focus on my affinity for the ephemeral, this is in part a remix of left over footage shot and then re-printed on a now defunct and sorely missed Kodak film stock, 7285. A record of my trudging foray into Step-Printing and the indulgence of rediscovering old scraps of images. Conversely, I applied the techniques of Richard Tuohy’s Chromaflex process to weld together then shred apart film scraps guided by an electric pleasure for a visual clash and at moments, harmony. (Simon Liu)

Ditchwork

Ditchwork · 2012

Ditchwork uses intimate physicality, folk-tale themes, and lush imagery to imaginatively fill in the blanks of a family history that is, like every history, both deeply known and unfathomably mysterious.

Refuse Room

Refuse Room · 2024

Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu’s Refuse Room captures Hong Kong’s architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.

Procedures

Procedures · 2026

Simon Liu, 2026

Flyer Boy

Flyer Boy · 2009

"Flyer Boy" focuses in on a young man who spends his days handing out flyers for a local Chinatown restaurant. His work is full of fleeting exchanges, passing gestures and people he tries to communicate with.

More Like This

Couldn't load this row right now.

Rate this film

Your ratings make Midnight smarter