Directed by Mary Stephen • Documentary • 2026 • 109 minutes
Spanning eight decades and four continents, filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen embarks on a personal investigation into her English surname. It is not intended to be a narcissistic exploration, but rather an effort to uncover the dissonances and contradictions in our heritage that, despite our all too human desire for harmony and continuity, are the fundamental elements that shape us.
Drawing from her father’s home movies and diaries, family photographs, fragments of oral history and official archives, Stephen constructs a layered polyphonic narrative where personal memory and collective history converge. How and why did Hilda Yik and Chan Tik Fong become Hilda and Henry Stephen? PALIMPSEST: THE STORY OF A NAME assembles a delicate, fragmented mosaic meditation on reinvention, the irresistible temptation to rewrite one's story, and on the universal human impulse to fictionalize the self.
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