How to Breathe? presents a series of four moving images in different formats, proposing ways to contemplate and experience breathing, life, and togetherness. Responding to the hybrid nature and dynamic interchanges of the microbial world, How to Breathe? mixes documentary film, video essay, and experimental cinema from the 1990s to the present moment to explore the interweaving of biology, ecology, community, politics, and affect. 

The screening opens with an excerpt from Symbiotic Earth (2017), a documentary by John Feldman, introducing biologist Lynn Margulis and her scientific endeavours to shift the competition-based view of evolution to a collaborative and symbiotic one. While bacteria breathe and metabolize, creating a world brimming with life, they also sing elegies in the premiere of Natalie Lo Lai Lai’s Rerooting Rebooting (2024–25), an essay film commemorating Lo’s late farming mentor, Uncle Ho. Lo narrates the process of death through the language of life, using footage and descriptions from her study of regenerative farming, contemplating the relation between the first and last breath. Another video work of Lo’s, Cold Fire (2019), reflects on social transformation through the structural changes that occur in food fermentation, brought by yeast and bacteria’s eating, breathing, and reproducing. Made during Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, Cold Fire links individuals’ social engagement with microbial activities, suggesting time and small-scale interactions as being foundational for fostering social change.

The screening ends with Grace Ma Lai Wah’s 1998 docudrama Cheers. Owner of Hong Kong’s legendary Club 71 (formerly Club 64), Ma’s experimental film restages daily scenes of the bar. From a first-person perspective, Ma accompanies the bar’s diverse clientele—intellectuals, gang members, drifters, among others. The intermingling and clashes of different lives and views at Club 71 make it a unique ecology for the director and audience members to sense and make sense of the society at large. Cheers is a special screening of the programme commemorating the thirty-sixth anniversary of the ’89 Democracy Movement, also known as the June Fourth.

Screening list:

Symbiotic Earth (excerpt, ‘Chapter 6: Bacteria run the planet’), John Feldman, 2017, 13' 30", English 

Rerooting, Rebooting, Lo Lai Lai Natalie, 2024, 10' 3", Cantonese with English subtitles

Symbiotic Earth (excerpt, ‘Chapter 7: Symbiosis is the way of life’), John Feldman, 2017, 16', English

Cold Fire, Lo Lai Lai Natalie, 2019, 10' 18", Chinese and English subtitles

Cheers, Grace Ma Lai Wah, 1998, 58' 58", Cantonese with Chinese and English subtitles