The Lost Secrets of the Royal project is a commissioning initiative of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) and the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival working with four new installations by Cindy Mochizuki, Daïchi Saïto, soJin Chun and Louise Noguchi. The discussions leading to this project originate with Colin Geddes’ donation of an archive of incomplete and decaying 35mm Hong Kong films salvaged from the basement of what is now Toronto’s Royal Cinema. The only stipulation for Geddes’ donation of this trove of orphaned reels was that they became the source for remaking, transforming and plundering into new works.

The collection includes period dramas, comedies, martial arts, and pink films. All the prints in the collection are incomplete and in various stages of decay and discolouration. Artists were invited to produce new works that could challenge the source material and break with overtly didactic collage-based composition. Emerging from this are four projects by contemporary Asian-Canadian artists that challenge cinematic narrative, locational identity, movement, and technologies.

—Ben Donoghue & Heather Keung