Tsz-wing Ho’s 2021 student film Hand is now available to stream after an impressive international festival run. Across 2021-2022, it screened at dozens of events including Ottawa, Zagreb, Odense Int’l Film Festival, Supernova (where it won the grand prize for student short), and the London Int’l Animation Festival (best abstract animation winner).
Describing the film’s origins on her website, Hong Kong-based animator and illustrator Ho says:
The idea of the work is to present the weird beauty of hand creatures composed of gestures, geometric shapes, and abstract patterns in order to create a surreal journey for the audience. The creatures undergo different transformations such as phenakistoscopes in synchrony with the music.
The film, made at City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media, features accompaniment in the form of Danish musician Mads Lindgren’s “Sekktortjek Ft. Tone.” The short, like the song, is divided into two distinct parts with the film’s aesthetics changing as the music dramatically evolves.
