Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025: Time Will Tell

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong, is pleased to present the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025, a vibrant three-day celebration of the diverse independent moving image practices that have shaped Asia's artistic landscape over the past six decades. From Friday, May 30 to Sunday, June 1, 2025, the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival celebrates this rich history through M+’s interdisciplinary lens of visual culture, with screenings, exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, and live acts.

The second edition of the AAGFF focuses on the theme of time, demonstrating the profound ways that artists and filmmakers engage with this concept through a medium intrinsically linked to duration. Time, an unyielding force that shapes all existence, is materialised and conceptualised through screenings, performances, and installations that highlight its fluid, cyclical, measured, manufactured, and abstract qualities. These works range from historical reenactments that interrogate notions of truth, nostalgia, and memory to speculative explorations of virtual and futuristic realms where time is artificially manipulated.

Headline guests at the AAGFF 2025 include May Fung, Ho Tzu Nyen, Tehching Hsieh, Amar Kanwar, Ali Wong Kit Yi, and Chikako Yamashiro. Ho Tzu Nyen will collaborate with independent singer-songwriter Wong Hin-yan on a new live-cinema performance at the Grand Stair. Ali Wong Kit-yi will present Timebombs!, a karaoke performance and lecture that investigates multilayered interpretations of time from Western and Eastern philosophical and theological perspectives, alongside her one-on-one performative activation One Hour Contract.

The AAGFF will also present fifteen screening programmes at M+ Cinema. Highlights include Chikako Yamashiro: Utterance Pulse, bringing together three films by Chikako Yamashiro that explore how the artist treats the human body’s inarticulate expressions as windows into repressed traumas, hidden histories, and other unseen dimensions of time. Amar Kanwar’s feature film Such a Morning is a modern parable about two people’s quiet engagement with the truth. Images Reflecting an Era—Early Avant-Garde Filmmaking in Hong Kong, showcases films by Law Kar, Sek Kei, and May Fung that have been recently acquired by M+ for the Asian Avant-Garde Film Circulation Library. Performing Time includes seven shorts reflecting on time and performativity, while Reactivating Histories considers post-colonial Asia and reflects on the complex efforts of Asian states to construct their independence and national identities. Timekeepers presents a collection of films that evoke an increasingly accelerated sense of time, and On the Clock: Reflections on Women’s Labour comprises three experimental documentaries that celebrate the vital contributions of women in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India the 1970s and early 1980s.

Audiences can also enjoy two looping screening programmes at M+ Cinema: Spotlight on the M+ Asian Avant-Garde Film Circulation Library, a new initiative dedicated to preserving and promoting Asian experimental film and video art, and Playtime!, curated for kids and families, which offers a joyful compilation of short films with dynamic rhythms and a strong sense of movement.

Finally, the M+ Moving Image Centre will once again feature a warm and inviting Festival Lounge, with artworks and activations that contemplate time by artists Tehching Hsieh, Henry Chu, and Andy Li. A variety of free programmes, including guided tours by M+ curators, artist encounters, talks, and workshops in screen-printing, bookmaking, and calendar-crafting, are also available throughout the festival.

For more details, please visit the festival website and Instagram. The Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival is support by CHANEL.