Screening of BAMBOO THEATRE and Dialogue with Director Cheuk Cheung

Join us for the screening of BAMBOO THEATRE and dialogue with director Cheuk Cheung.

Date: 26 Mar 2025
Time: 1500—1700
Venue: SDE3, Level 4, LT425
Film is in Cantonese with English subtitles

Bamboo Theatre

【DMZ International Documentary Film Festival】
【Golden Horse Film Festival】
【Singapore Chinese Film Festival】
【CinemAsia Film Festival】
【Berlin Art Week】

While permanent theatres are commonly built in most cosmopolitan modern cites, Hong Kong preserves a unique theatrical architecture, a Chinese tradition that has lasted more than a century – Bamboo Theatre.

It is a makeshift, open-air and bamboo shed theatre, which is built and fixed by plastic straps, without any heavy-duty materials. During festivities in the villages, they will invite Chinese opera troupes to perform ritualistic opera in the temporary theatre constructed in front of the temple, in order to express their gratitude to the Chinese gods they worship. Spirits and gods were the primary audiences. This film follows ritual practices in various villages and remote islands of Hong Kong for two years. It is the portrait of this traditional cultural space, its way of building and dismantling, also the collaborative work of troupes’ performers, stage managers and wardrobe, etc. It allows audience to observe multiple corners of the space, and the variety of ways in which people make use of it.

Cheuk Cheung is a Hong Kong filmmaker who graduated from the School of Film and TV of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Co-founder of A Priori Image, who directed three documentaries about Chinese Opera (Xiqu), including My Way, My Next Step and Bamboo Theatre. He was named Artist of the Year at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, was nominated for Best Documentary at the Golden Horse Awards and Best New Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards with Bamboo Theatre. In 2017, he was invited by Tokyo Arts and Space’s residency program. In 2018, he co-directed a theatre piece Songs of Portrait, involving diverse background artists from Kunqu, Noh and Opera.

Recently, Cheuk had collaborative projects with different Asian choreographers and dance artists, including video installation for Hong Kong Museum of Art’s exhibition City Rhymes: The Melodious Notes of Calligraphy, and two short films Someday I Will Become a Rock and Stillness in the Wave, they were screened in Bucharest, Lisbon, Athens, Montreal, Tokyo and Singapore, etc. His latest drama series The Floating Generation featuring three women who are seeking a new life overseas due to their own reasons and expectations, it was released in Hong Kong’s ViuTV channel. Now he is working on a documentary about Japanese Noh Actor.

Please enjoy the trailer here: