← Close

Letters Left on the Dining Table
Essay film, 2025

Trailer: 04:09sec
*The full version of the film is currently in post-production*

DIRECTOR& SCREENWRITER: Shu He
SOUND DESIGN: Tim Brooks
VOICE CAST:
H (Male Voice) - Jufan Pan
S (Female Voice) - Yutong Lu

Letters Left on the Dining Table
Trailer, 04:09sec

This is a past reconstructed through archives. Two “ghosts,” drifting through restaurants and carrying memories from different eras, find a connection in a fictional space—drawn together by a shared sense of identity and unspoken loss. Through letters, they begin a dialogue across time and space: confiding, sharing fragments of daily life, recounting stories that are about to be forgotten, or perhaps have never been told. Through words, they attempt to imagine a moment of recognition. Here, time exists only in imagination.

“Because I know that time is always time. And place is always and only place.” —T. S. Eliot

The inspiration for this project stems from the artist’s own experiences and emotional landscape.

The two characters in the film, H and S, represent—respectively—a microcosm of the historical Chinese community in London and myself, who grew up in the environment of a Western-style restaurant. Through an intimate perspective and everyday storytelling, the film connects two disappearing worlds nearly a century apart, in an attempt to awaken a collective sense of belonging that transcends the personal and the historical.

How can archives be used to reconstruct memory?
How can imagination be employed—and how can the audience be guided to imagine?
--To imagine different cultures, to imagine different identities,
--To imagine different ways of life, to imagine an era,
--To imagine stories that never existed,
--To imagine shared emotions.

Home