This screening will begin with a live dance performance by Rachel Wang and concludes with an in-person Q&A with Japanese filmmaker Kaori Oda, director of Thus A Noise Speaks.

Curated by The Knot Collective, the programme presents intimate non-fiction films that move beyond stereotypes to explore the complex tensions between duty and selfhood in East Asian motherhood. In cultures where maternal self-sacrifice and emotional restraint are idealised, these works centre the agency and emotional depth of mothers navigating egg donation, mental illness, single parenthood, and raising non-binary children.

MOM

Artist. Rachel Wang

2025, UK, China, 5’

In this dance performance that opens the programme, the artist discovers the resemblance between the deep red cloak symbolising her mother and the hem of her own skirt. Realising her true longing for this connection to her mother, she finds the answers to her healing journey and decides to rebuild this connection.

Fantastic Eggs and Where to Find Them

Dir. Vitty Ho

2024, Hong Kong, Taiwan, 30’

This is an egg donation diary of a 27-year-old girl, as well as a love letter to her unborn child, whom she will never meet. Five blood draws, nine ovulation injections, two ovulation-triggering shots, countless pills and growth hormones, and one general anesthesia surgery, resulting in 40 eggs, NT$99,000, and a lifetime of endless concern.

Transparent, I am.

Dir. Yuri Muraoka

2020, Hong Kong, Taiwan, 12’

In the year of 2020 when the world was forced to 'change'. I wanted to confirm what changed and what did not change in me and wrote a poem 'Transparent, I am.' This film is based on it. The white mask I wore became the screen projected my past. My family are sometimes hurt and suffer, but support me who suffers from schizophrenia. Nonoho, Yuri, Nemu and Hana. The four of us live today to the fullest while looking for the answer to 'Who are we?'  - Yuri

Tiger and Ox

Dir. Seunghee Kim

2019, South Korea, 8’

A mother told her daughter to keep her father’s absence a secret. Years later, they look back on the prejudices they encountered as a single-parent family in South Korea.

Thus A Noise Speaks

Dir. Kaori Oda

2010, Japan, 38’

A family dinner shifts from celebration to discomfort when Oda reveals to their family that they are non-binary. But the dinner is a recreation of the real event two weeks after the fact and the director has re-staged it to force their family members to consider their responses and the dynamics at play.

The Knot Collective is a newly established film club dedicated to showcasing independent works that centre the narratives of East and Southeast Asian women and non-binary individuals, using cinema as an act of collective reflection and cross-cultural dialogue that weaves stories into the fabric of diasporic identity and shared cultural memory.