The Polygon Gallery proudly supports the Canadian premier of Memories to Choke on, Drinks to Wash Them Down at the 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival. This year's VIFF is online, and all films can be enjoyed at home on demand between September 24 and October 7.

Memories to Choke on, Drinks to Wash Them Down
Directed by Leung Ming-kai & Kate Reilly
Runtime: 77 minutes
Cantonese with English subtitles

Four stories (three fictional, one documentary) show how fiction and fact, humour and drama, the personal and political are complementary facets of the same ever-fascinating, complex, challenging realities that constitute Hong Kong.

An intrepid domestic worker from Indonesia wisely guides her aging but energetic elderly charge on a deceptively circuitous outing. In a nostalgia-purveying toy shop, two twenty-something brothers retrieve fragmented memories of their youth. Two young professional teachers – a savvy local man, and a foreign woman fascinated by Hong Kong food delights – immerse themselves in a shared discovery of HK culture. A politically engaged barista-cum-actress decides to run in the hotly contested 2019 elections.

Leung Ming-kai and Kate Reilly’s ambitious structural gambit results in a work that delights and gently provokes. With deceptive lightness and elegance, their film plumbs the tensions and contradictions that underlie and activate Hong Kong’s predicament today.