This is the opening film of the Hong Kong Film Festival UK 2025. Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns for its third edition from 12–28 September in London, presenting reflective, boundary-shifting cinema from Hong Kong and the ESEA diaspora. This year’s programme foregrounds transient and transitioning identities, exploring perspectives on migration, activism, marginalised communities, and gender, highlighting also the creative lens of women filmmakers. From dynamic contemporary works to intimate personal narratives, the festival centres voices that challenge, navigate, and reimagine belonging. Supported by the BFI. Over the last decade, Hong Kong has seen a new wave of social realist filmmaking with director Oliver Chan as one of its most exciting proponents. With Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不), she follows up her landmark debut Still Human (2018) with an acutely observed drama about a young baker, Jing, and the challenges she faces as the mother of a newborn, stuck between a pushy mother-in-law and an unhelpful husband. Akin to the work of a socially-conscious filmmaker like Ken Loach, a realist depiction of motherhood is used to explore the subtle, everyday forms of oppression that maintain women’s position within patriarchal Asian societies. This critique develops through an increasingly stifling soundtrack, made with accomplished sound designer Tu Duu-chih (Yi Yi, In the Mood for Love, Millennium Mambo), that threatens to push the film toward psychological horror. Premiering at Busan and officially selected at Tokyo and Hong Kong International Film Festival, it won the Golden Horse NETPAC Award and Best Actress at Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards. Indeed, it is a masterful character study carried by Hedwig Tam’s central performance – one that sympathetically explores the social expectations that can overwhelm new mothers in the seemingly unavoidable collision between traditional values and modern sensibilities.