Between East and West: The Cinema of Mary Stephen

By the age of 25, the peripatetic Mary Stephen had already circled the globe: born in British Hong Kong, immersed in cinephilia during her studies at Montreal’s Concordia University (then Loyola), Stephen went on to establish herself in the film industry upon relocating to Paris, where she would become a vital collaborator of Éric Rohmer, first working as an editor on his 1981 The Aviator’s Wife (in which she appears briefly) and last on his final film, 2007’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon. Still very much in-demand for her prowess at cutting today, Stephen is also a director in her own right, and will be visiting Metrograph to screen some of her finest works in that capacity: 1978’s Ombres de Soie, her newly restored, meticulously shot, moody, Marguerite Duras-inspired debut, this year’s Palimpsest: The Story of a Name, a fascinating inquiry into the origins of her Chinese family’s Western surname in Hong Kong’s complicated colonial past, and a selection of her newly restored short films.