Palimpsest: The Story of a Name

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD – Red Lotus Asian Film Festival 2026

Over the course of eight decades and across four continents, filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen embarks on a deeply personal journey of discovery in search of the origins of her English surname. Drawing on her father’s home movies and diaries, family photographs, her own travel footage, fragments of oral histories, and official archives, Stephen constructs a layered, polyphonic narrative in which personal memory and collective history converge. The film moves from the working-class neighborhoods of Hong Kong, where teacher Hilda Yik marries worker Chan Tik Fong amid small businesses and Hollywood dreams, to Wuhan, where British intellectual Julian Bell—son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf—begins a scandalous affair with a renowned, married Chinese writer, and on to places such as the Australian Outback, Montreal and Toronto, London and Cambridge, Paris and Cassis—always in search of improbable discoveries and meaningful encounters. How and why did Hilda Yik and Chan Tik Fong become Hilda and Henry Stephen?

With this film, Mary Stephen reassembles the pieces of a forgotten mosaic, creating a meditation on new beginnings and the irresistible temptation to rewrite one’s own story—and to reinvent oneself again and again.

In recognition of her body of work as a filmmaker and editor, we are proud to present Mary Stephen with the RED LOTUS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 2026. Due to her fragile health, it will unfortunately most likely not be possible for Mary Stephen to travel to Vienna in person, so we are planning an online conversation with the artist before the screening of the film.