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Ashlyn Chak

For most of her life, veteran filmmaker Mary Stephen has carried a quiet mystery with her, one embedded in her very name.
Born and raised in Hong Kong to what she describes as “a typical Chinese family”, she has a birth certificate that names her parents as Henry Stephen and Yick Chuk-kwan.
This anomaly is the driving force behind her new documentary film, Palimpsest: the Story of a Name, which is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada on September 11.
“We were, by all appearances, a typical Chinese family. All appearances, yes, but not our name,” she explains in the film’s trailer.


This discrepancy has followed her from Hong Kong to Montreal and Paris, raising the same questions that she has asked herself for decades.
“Everywhere I go, people don’t just say ‘Mary’ or ‘Ms Stephen’. They always call me ‘Mary Stephen’, all in one go,” she says with a laugh about her non-Chinese surname. “I’ve always been asked why, and I had never been able to answer that, because I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why exactly.”
In a video call from her home in Paris, she tells the Post: “I had, for all my life, a sort of mistaken identity. I wanted to explore the impact of this, being a Chinese person with an English name.”
This lifelong sense of alienation has mirrored a journey lived across continents. It began when, at 15, her family emigrated from Hong Kong to Montreal.
Later, in the mid-1970s, her love for the French New Wave – kindled during her childhood in Hong Kong – drew her to an exchange programme in Paris, a city she would soon call home.

It was there, in a filmmaking class, that she met Éric Rohmer in an encounter that would change the course of her life and career. The legendary director took her under his wing for years before recommending her to work as an assistant on a film he was starting, The Aviator’s Wife (1981).
At this point, Stephen had already made her first low-budget feature, Shades of Silk (1978), which was recently restored with help from Hong Kong’s M+ museum, and will screen in the Revivals section at the New York Film Festival in October 2025.
“[Rohmer] said, ‘I know you have already directed two films, but would you agree to work as an assistant to my editor, just so you can get your status to stay [in Paris]?’” she says.
“His editor was Cécile Decugis, who was [Jean-Luc] Godard’s film editor for Breathless [1960]. That was any cinephile’s dream, so I said, ‘Of course I would.’”
Aside from gaining experience, she also had a cameo in the 1981 film.

As she gradually became a film editor in her own right, Stephen officially began a working relationship with Rohmer, which started with The Adventures of Rosette (1983) and ended with The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007), his final work before his death.
While Stephen built her own work portfolio, she also started to seek answers about her own family history.
Around the early 2000s, a friend told her about how the English writer Virginia Woolf’s maiden name was also Stephen, and that she and her sister had lesser-known relations with China, as Woolf’s nephew lived there between 1935 and 1937 and developed a love affair with a Chinese intellectual.
This interesting parallel between the two Stephen families prompted the Hong Kong-born film editor to investigate her own story.

The research was conducted on and off for two decades – while Stephen was largely occupied with editing other people’s films, including 2017’s Our Time Will Come – until 2021, when some French producers with whom she had been working offered to produce for her, thus reviving her personal pursuit for truth.
Stephen says that much of the research and filmmaking process happened in Canada, where she returned to her family home to dig up old materials.
However, one of the main threads throughout Palimpsest: the Story of a Name is an association between the Woolf sisters and the Stephen sisters, as both sides serve as mirrors to British and Hong Kong identities, as well as a probe into colonialism. At some point, the two seemingly parallel stories converge.
“Many things in the film were discovered while I was doing my research,” Stephens says. “Even at the last minute, when I was editing, I was still finding new facts from all over the place – stories my parents told, journals of my father. He wrote in his journal that his side of the family were Australian natives.
“From the very beginning, I was weaving together this film with the notion that I am a filmmaker who works mainly editing facts and fiction. So, there’s a subtheme [in Palimpsest] about what is fact, what is fiction and whether we always rewrite our own stories.”

Some other major themes in her documentary include displacement, cultural identity and “being uprooted”, which Stephen says are “recurring themes” in her work.
Fittingly, the 2025 film is a deeply personal yet geographically diverse project, with footage shot in places from France and Canada to Hong Kong and Australia.
“Even in Australia, where some of the story takes place, I used a lot of my own footage [from before when] I went there to teach or film,” she says.
“A lot of the film was made up of footage that my father shot of our lives in the 1950s in Hong Kong. It became a journey into the archives, which the whole film was made up of. It was fascinating to me, going back to [those videos that can be] very precious for people researching about Hong Kong [in that era].”
She says the film is not “a classic documentary”. Rather than following a linear timeline, it plays with the rules of time.
“When you see it, you will see that this is really an editor’s film. I mean, only an editor can make this film,” she chuckles.
“I take a lot of liberties with chronology, juggling different eras and different facts. It is linear in the sense that there are chunks of stories, but it’s not linear as a structure. It’s almost like a tapestry, weaving the whole thing together.”

If anything, Palimpsest: the Story of a Name is about storytelling: “What is real? What is made up? Even memory – is it real?” Stephen seems to ask.
“We have selective memories. Although a lot of the film is shown as archive footage [such as that] shot by my father, the way that he filmed it and what he chose to film are selective, because we don’t see the other side,” she says.
“That is really what documentaries are about, right? There’s no such thing as an ‘objective documentary’. Everything is subjective; it’s selected.”
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A photo of Mary Stephen’s parents Henry and Hilda Stephen, as seen in Palimpsest: the Story of a Name. Photo: Mary Stephen

Hong Kong-born filmmaker Mary Stephen is pictured in France, where she filmed some of her new documentary, Palimpsest: the Story of a Name, which is set to premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo: Mary Stephen

Mary Stephen’s mother, Hilda Stephen, whose maiden name was Yick Chuk-kwan, was a writer. Photo: Mary Stephen

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Stephen’s late father, Henry. Photo: Mary Stephen

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Being raised in a Chinese family with an English surname left Mary Stephen with questions she seeks to answer in her new documentary


Being raised in a Chinese family with an English surname left Mary Stephen with questions she seeks to answer in her new documentary.


Hong Kong-born filmmaker Mary Stephen digs into her family’s past in new documentary

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Being raised in a Chinese family with an English surname left Mary Stephen with questions she seeks to answer in her new documentary

Being raised in a Chinese family with an English surname left Mary Stephen with questions she seeks to answer in her new documentary