The first in a film series on cities around the world, using gender as a lens to interpret each city’s identity.

“From the porthole I could barely distinguish her in the magnetic, all-encompassing night. When I was striving to, she was there, bathing in this particular evening amber light. Hong Kong was graceful and slender, a soft fine head of hair with dark highlights; a distinctively feminine silhouette.  Her youthful visage was slightly obscured by sea mist, half-open shinny eyes sparkling like a set of mirrors locked on the nearby mountain. Her perfumes, her colours and sounds were responding to each other in my mind. Mildness of Victoria’s harbour, wild vegetation and the sound of high heels calling us into its protective streets.  Hong Kong drags forsaken sailors to the extraordinary, the strange and the unexpected. Its ambassadors, wise and elegant women, pull the strings from avant-garde parlours. The city has a certain stubbornness that surpasses willpower and rather comes from a compulsive need to impose its own personal guidelines upon the world, a city that remains both very close and infinitely remote at the same time.
This is the truly feminine impression the city laid upon me.”
Text and film by Jean-Claude Thibaut