Map of Traces is a black-and-white experimental film that weaves poetic reflection, personal testimony, and socio-political commentary into a layered portrait of Hong Kong’s urban and emotional landscape. The work unfolds through a range of cinematic techniques. Digital screen recordings that navigate Google Street View invites the viewer to follow the onscreen cursor as it clicks through fragmented, frozen moments of city life. We see anonymous figures captured mid-step, relieving themselves into bushes, congregating, playing street games among shopfronts, plazas and city streets. The artist and her friend speculate about the lives briefly glimpsed and consider the changes to the scene since the time of capturing these images. These passing interactions evoke a longing to grasp what lies beyond the visible frame: lost time, distant memory, or forgotten connection.

Haunting electronic static forms the film’s soundscape, underscoring a sense of disquiet and historical weight. Interspersed throughout are intertitles, white text on black, offering intimate written reflections, poetic meditations, and snippets of personal correspondence. These become a counterpoint to the cool detachment of the digital images, expressing themes of loss, transformation, and resilience in the face of a rapidly changing city. The film gradually transitions into documentary-style street footage captured with handheld, guerrilla techniques. Testimonies emerge and we see street artists, activists and musicians while some recall detainment, discuss surveillance, and acts of resistance inscribed on city walls. Collage-like visuals overlay graffiti motifs with live footage, forming a kind of concrete cinema. Street musicians and performers appear as vital forces within the city’s pulse, with one intertitle inviting viewers to consider whether music and creative expression might serve as deeper, more fugitive response to authority than language itself.

Amidst surveillance and political control, nature becomes a symbol of constancy. A final sentiment suggests that the mountain remains unchanged, standing in contrast to the volatility of urban life. Map of Traces becomes more than a document of an environment; it forms a kind of psychogeography, an emotional and social map that binds people, environments, and rhythms of daily life. Without overt narration or explanation, Chan Hau Chun offers an alternative way of mapping, one grounded in perception, relation, and quiet attentiveness to the interconnected ecologies that shape not only a territory but a sense of place in all its temporal, relational and geographical specificity. A politics from below. The film concludes with a panoramic, fog-draped shot of people overlooking the city. With the haze, the distance, the perspective, it is the mountain that dwarfs the view.