Report: Hong Kong Perma-Cinema and Slow Hope with Heidelberg Fellow Zimu Zhang

14. July, Heidelberg

The screening event “Hong Kong Perma-Cinema and Slow Hope” took place twice in the summer of 2025: first on June 21 as part of the international environmental film network in Frankfurt, and on July 14 at Heidelberg University’s CATS Auditorium under the title “Worlding Hong Kong: Perma-Cinema and Slow Hope”. The event in Heidelberg was jointly organized by the Worldmaking CATS Kolleg “Epochal Lifeworlds: Narratives of Crisis and Change,” the Confucius Institute Heidelberg, as well as the screening series “Sinophone Filmmaking”.

 

The curator Zimu Zhang, Worldmaking fellow in Heidelberg in 2025, is an environmental humanities scholar and Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. She presented the works of six young Hong Kong artists: Chan Hau Chun, Chan Ting, Huang Ting, Lo Lai Lai Natalie, Chung Wong, and Long Wong, whose creative practices collectively shape the emerging perma-cinema movement in Hong Kong. All the featured works explore how filmmaking intertwines with sustainable living, community building, and ecological thinking. The artists approach sustainability through diverse forms, from urban farming, rural sojourns, vegan collectives, sound-based environmental documentation to personal emotions and memories. Reflecting on social ruptures and upheavals in the last decades in Hong Kong, the films offer subtle and intimate perspectives on Hong Kong people’s coexistence with nature as well as history. If“ecology is political,”then politics may be understood as ecological, too, from the perspective that finds expression in perma-cinema’s politics of resilience and resistance. Together, their works embody what environmental historian Christof Mauch calls “slow hope”: a form of hope rooted in perseverance through trauma, uncertainty, and crisis.