My name is Victoria Elen Drave Leung. I’m a Hongkonger and UK-based student filmmaker, theatre-maker, photographer, and actor. I am currently a Third-year studying Film and Theatre at Lancaster University. As an Asian, queer and disabled artist, my work revolves around my experience of the world.
As both a filmmaker and theatremaker, my practice inevitably consolidates theories and inspirations from both mediums. My subjective perception in life influences my work, and in particular, heightens my interest in experimental filmmaking. My art is human, messy, tender, rhythmic, and fragmented. I focus on the mundane, microscopic details of everyday life, often framing regular and familiar moments in experimental ways; juxtaposing, interspersing, chopping, and rearranging them. My work intends to make viewers question the validity of memory, unflinchingly confront their perception and illustrate my unique experience.
I hope my films nurture a growing appreciation for the peculiar nature of memory and life.
Vic Drave
Synopsis:
Join Victoria as they remember, forget, discover, and rediscover their grandfather, who passed away in 2021. This delicate and emotional experimental film captures the personality, love, and life of everyday objects, and brings the fragmented memories of their grandfather back to life. Performed alongside a set of Cantonese and English spoken letters, nostalgic Hong Kong background noise, and snippets of an interview with him before he died, “you live on” mirrors the gentle mourning and kindness of commemoration, and the performative, shattered nature of remembering and forgetting.
Artist’s Statement:
In Chinese culture, “family” is one of the building blocks of society. I loved my grandfather dearly, and spent a considerable amount of time with my grandparents in my childhood and through my teenage years. When I began to lose my memory, those moments with my grandfather became even more important to cherish: the three sugars he would have in his coffee, the way he would read his newspaper while squatting on the ground.
He became fragmented, characterised by these objects and moments that weren’t fully complete or temporally accurate. Once my family emigrated to the UK, this effect was exasperated by the distance, and his passing in January of 2021. These moments meshed together, pulled apart, and through the medium of experimental filmmaking, I was able to process my grief and recreate memories through the lens of a psychoanalytic and formalist approach. All of us will experience grief, and no doubt in many different ways. People often say grief does not get easier, just that we deal with it better.
If you can, if you want to: call your grandparents, tell them you love them, visit them sometime.
I hope you can resonate with my film.
Victoria Drave
