A Name Etched in Erasure: Mary Stephen’s Palimpsest and the Ghosts of Empire

Mary Stephen, Hong Kong-born editor and filmmaker, spent over two decades as Éric Rohmer’s go-to editor, cutting films from The Aviator’s Wife (1981) to his final feature in 2007. She also edited Last Train Home and Ann Hui’s Our Time Will Come. In 2025, she turned the lens inward with Palimpsest: The Story of a Name, winner of the Golden Horse Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Film Editing. The title refers to a manuscript scraped clean and rewritten—a metaphor for a family history deliberately erased across generations.

The film asks: why does a Chinese woman, born to Chinese parents in colonial Hong Kong, carry the English surname Stephen? Her father’s 8mm home movies, diaries, and photographs transform the screen into a time machine. We glimpse the family’s rise from labouring-class beginnings against a backdrop where one million Chinese were governed by twenty thousand Europeans. Stephen augments this with archival material from the Hong Kong Film Archive and Michael Rogge, a Dutch banker who documented the 1950s territory. For Hong Kong viewers, these images are haunting: trams gliding through a British-colonial city, family picnics beneath a rising skyline.

Stephen also unearths footage of 1930s Wuhan, a treaty port carved open by foreign powers, soon ravaged by Japanese invasion. Here the surname leads to Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Julian Bell, whose affair with Chinese writer Ling Shuhua is traced through letters and fragments.

The film reveals the white-supremacist hierarchy that forced Stephen’s father to adopt a European surname as a survival strategy. Would Henry Stephen have prospered as Chan Tik-fong? Would Mary Stephen have become Rohmer’s editor under a Chinese name? The answer is no.

The wider context is China’s “hundred years of humiliation” (1840–1949), when foreign powers carved the nation into spheres of influence. Palimpsest shows this at the granular level of one family: the names changed, the identities forged and covered over.

To watch this as a Hong Konger in 2026 is to marvel at the distance travelled. The China of Stephen’s childhood was a land of colonial deference. Today’s China—over 18% of global GDP, a defence budget second only to the US—is a superpower no nation dares to cross lightly. The film is tender, skeptical, and essential. For the young generation of Hong Kong who has no knowledge of our colonial past in Hong Kong and on the mainland, this is a must-see—a vital primer on how deeply that history shaped the very names we carry, and how far we have truly come.

Elven Ho