On the Turntable, in the Drawer: Essay Film, Interactive Archive, and Women&#x02019;s Independent Documentary in Hong Kong

Xinran Liu

doi:10.65961/hks-2026-52-004

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Hong Kong Studies ›› 2026, Vol. 5 ›› Issue (2) : 3. DOI: 10.65961/hks-2026-52-004

On the Turntable, in the Drawer: Essay Film, Interactive Archive, and Women’s Independent Documentary in Hong Kong

Xinran Liu

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Abstract

This article compares Anson Mak Hoi-shan’s essay-film documentary One Way Street on a Turntable (2007) and Kimburley Choi Wing-yee’s interactive ethnofiction installation A Story of One’s Own (2022) to examine how experimental documentary forms make everyday experience historically meaningful in Hong Kong. Drawing on Linda Lai’s history of everyday life and Mary Holmes’s account of the gendered organization of everyday life, I propose feminist everyday historiography as a framework for reading these works. The article situates both practices within Hong Kong’s evolving institutional and cross-media ecology and compares how different media forms connect situated experience with historical change.

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Xinran Liu. On the Turntable, in the Drawer: Essay Film, Interactive Archive, and Women’s Independent Documentary in Hong Kong.Hong Kong Studies2026 , 5(2): 3. https://doi.org/10.65961/hks-2026-52-004

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