“The Shortest Day of the Year” is a film that follows the journey of a Hong Kong immigrant, Sze, during her first winter in London.
Viewers will see Sze navigate the relationships that surround her, the strained long-distance relationship with her boyfriend back in Hong Kong, her life at work as well as the Chinese community in London.
The movie is set during the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, an important festival in Chinese culture, and a day when families should gather. But instead, we see people who are still looking for where they belong and where connection still beckons.
According to director Will Chen, “As a person who moved to the UK from HK, like many others in recent years, I often felt invisible, surrounded by people, yet deeply alone. Life kept moving, but something inside me felt paused. I started to question why I am here and how I can keep moving forward. This film comes from that feeling. It is not about something big and dramatic. It is about the quiet ache of living between places, cultures, and identities.”
The cast is made up of actors from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China who live in London.
Chen is a Hong Kong-born writer and director, based in London and graduating from London Film School. His work focuses on identity, relationships and realism.
As a person who moved to the UK from HK, like many others in recent years, I often felt invisible, surrounded by people, yet deeply alone.
When he was living in Spain during the pandemic, he shot his first film, a documentary about Chinese immigrants living in Spain, and was nominated in several Spanish film festivals and streamed on FILMIN, a cinephile streaming platform in Spain.
Chen says he is now trying to explore more stories in the UK from the perspective of a person who just moved there, trying to voice out the social realism hidden stories in society, like what his favorite UK filmmakers Andrea Arnold and Ken Loach do.
Chen adds:
“Like many Hong Kongers who have moved to the UK, I think that there are many things we don’t know how to express about the complicated feelings of moving. Not even in our own language.
“Film became a way for me to be honest in my expression. Like Chloe Zhao said in an interview recently: ‘Language is beautiful but sometimes it separates us because we don‘t understand it. But a smile is a smile, and a touch is a touch.’
“This film is a way of reminding me where I came from, while trying to understand where I am now.”
Chen is conducting a crowdfunding campaign to complete post-production and recover a portion of the costs that made the film possible.
Check out the film’s Kickstarter page.
