Metrograph

Summoning up a remarkably convincing 1930s Shanghai in the Paris of the late ’70s, Stephen’s newly restored feature debut, the seductively dreamlike, exquisitely composed Ombres de Soie, charts the shifting (and ambiguous) dynamics between two women whose lingering connection is hinted— through subtle gestural cues and privileged snippets of voice-over—to be more than just the uncomplicated bond we call “friendship.” Both an homage to 1975’s India Song, white, French Indochina–born Marguerite Duras’s narcotic depiction of the chartered life of Calcutta’s isolated European colony, and a rejoinder to it, courtesy Stephen, an ethnically Chinese child of British Hong Kong whose understanding of colonialism came from a perspective quite different from that of Duras. Screens with two shorts by Stephen, newly restored: Labyrinthe, an experimental, oneiric work dating from Stephen’s time in Canada that suggests either a cinematic meditation on cross-cultural identity, on the psychological impact of cross-cutting, or on both, in which two identically dressed women, one white, one Asian, negotiate winding, maze-like corridors, and A Very Easy Death, Stephen’s metaphor-rich, deeply compassionate contemplation of her mother’s death and its aftermath, which takes its title from the 1964 book by Simone de Beauvoir.

Labyrinthe(1973, 5min)

A Very Easy Death(1975, 8min)

Ombre de Soie(1978, 61min)