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29 Jan – 8 Feb 2026

Mary Stephen

Mary STEPHEN (1953, Hong Kong) is a filmmaker and editor based in Paris. She studied film at Concordia University in Montreal, where she began making films in the early 1970s. Her early work was shaped by experimental cinema and explored memory, identity, and subjectivity, drawing inspiration from filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Charles Gagnon. Alongside her own filmmaking practice, Stephen is widely known for her long collaboration as editor with Éric Rohmer, working on his films from The Aviator’s Wife (1981) to The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007). Her film Shades of Silk (1978) has since been recognised as a key work of diasporic Asian cinema. Her recent documentary Palimpsest: the Story of a Name (2025) examines questions of lineage and personal history.

Filmography

Labyrinthe (1973), The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), A Very Easy Death (1975), Ombres de soie/Shades of Silk (1978), Palimpsest: the Story of a Name (2025)

Mary Stephen at IFFR

  • Ombres de soie

    Mary Stephen | 62' | France | No premiere

    A sensual essay on hybridity in defiance of purist ideas about ethnicity and gender.

  • Love After Love

    Ann Hui | 141' | China | None

    Not available on Festival Scope Pro

  • Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon

    Éric Rohmer | 109' | France | None

    According to rumours, the last but as-ever charming film by Rohmer is a bucolic ‘moral tale’ situated in the fifth century in Gall. The young…

  • My Marlon and Brando

    Hüseyin Karabey | 92' | Netherlands | World premiere

    Dramatic road movie based on a true story about a young theatre actress from Istanbul who wants to go to her lover. The problem is…

  • L’Anglaise et le Duc

    Éric Rohmer | 128' | France | -

    A subjective view of the French Revolution based on the diaries of an English lady. By French New Wave director Éric Rohmer.

  • Majority

    Seren Yüce | 102' | Turkey | None

    A wonderful portrait of a rural family and modern city existence, told through the life (and its problems) of a teenage boy, his relatives and…

  • Conte d’été

    Éric Rohmer | 113' | France | -

    Summer holidays on the Brittany coast. Adventures of four kids in brilliant latest Eric Rohmer.