Meet Azure Kwok | Film Director & Documentarian

We had the good fortune of connecting with Azure Kwok and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Azure, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?
I was born and raised in Hong Kong, a city where the clash of cultures and histories forges a resilient and unique identity. Born during the 2003 SARS pandemic, I’ve felt as though I have lived my entire life through turbulent and transformative times. The call to radicalization came knocking on my door when I was 11, during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. It was then that I was first stunned by the power of collective action as my people took to the streets to protest, disobey, resist, and dismantle oppressive structures.

By the time I found myself on the frontline during the 2019 Anti-ELAB movement, I understood that it was not a simple rebellion. We’re all embracing fear to become fearless; embracing anger to become passionate; embracing love to become infinite; embracing each other to become liberated. The most profound lesson I learned from that time, the one that still reverberates and shapes my perspective today, was to ‘Be Water.’

Ever since I fled, I’ve devoted myself to the work of collective liberation. We are waves and there’s immense power within us, our beliefs carry disproportional energy. I don’t want to live in a world where there is no possibility of freedom, where it’s not dreaming and fighting for a better life for everyone. My time in the US has exposed me to myriad expressions that broadened my capacities to communicate and comprehend. Since Toni Cade Bambara said, ‘As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.’ Whatever I create nowadays, I’m ultimately trying to incite change – to advance human understanding and compassion while stretching the limit of the expressive language unique to the medium.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
As a kid, I’ve always wanted depth, a way to find out what matters to me. So the universe listened and responded with back-to-back intense, irrational, complex experiences, and extreme situations. They’re far beyond my control, immune to my will, strength, and logic. I couldn’t detach from them or pretend they didn’t matter. They pushed me to my limits, made me drop my defense and surrender. I was feeling way more than I wanted because I was taken into the unknown. My reactions were unpredictable and intense because I am only human. So for a while, I took everything very personally, and blamed the universe for all of my scars. But as time goes on, my body starts to recognize the feeling of being pushed down and having to build myself back up. Chaos and turmoil are just the sacred time for destruction and rebirth.

Creating is first and foremost a channel for me to process and externalize feelings amidst the chaos. My goal has always been to get closer to myself. Regardless of the medium or tool I create with, my mind, body, and soul are the only instruments I have full access to. Through myself, the universe that surrounds us all comes into focus. Ever since I started practicing the habit of speaking and writing only the truth, the habit has worked its way into my heart and made me feel more at ease in life.

Creation is ultimately an extension of the divine, where divinity is freedom. I was made in the image of the divine so I seek to be liberated. We all hold the power to create and destroy in our hands: to reshape the world in our truth. But the Anthropocene under capitalism reduces the means of reshaping our world down to the acquisition of currency only. We are all forced to uphold opulence as desirable and lucrative to maintain the status quo. So when I work, I usually like to explore the truth that belongs to the grassroots – the truths we can use to swing the pendulums, the truths that orient ourselves to believe in our agency more than we believe in the inevitability of suffering.

My journey has led me to making documentaries. I was reluctant to be fully cozy with the documentarian title until I started dabbling my feet into environmental and wildlife filmmaking. Mother nature always has a way of untying the knots in my heart. A documentary reveals itself as it is being made. It tells you exactly what it wants to be if you listen close enough. And nothing makes me feel more alive than that.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Hike: Doll’s Head Trail
Visit: Atlanta Botanical Garden
Visit: Phoenix & Dragon Bookstore
Eat: Pho Dai Loi

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Gabriel Gutierrez Morales (@todalapapita on Instagram)

Gabriel has been here for me since the very beginning of my career in the States. We met at a community college in Seattle where we got our associate’s, we have been working and creating together ever since. As a queer immigrant from Tijuana, Mexico, Gabriel comes from a completely different background than me. But at his core, he is a multidisciplinary artist like myself. There’s a kind of alignment in the way we work, and the way we perceive and process the world. So communication and collaboration come to us very naturally. Gabriel and I have partnered on countless projects across different areas. We share an unspoken commitment to sensitivity that opens our hearts in the way we work.

We recently wrapped up his short film ‘Boyslut,’ one of the boldest stories I’ve ever worked on. Gabriel’s always had a unique and compelling perspective on topics of sexuality and self-image. Contributing to a project led by him, one that explicitly addresses these themes was exhilarating. Gabriel facilitated a space for each of us on the team to offer our own radical truth. It’s a powerful experience to witness the work coming together as if it has a life of its own. Gabriel brought out my most personal and proudest cinematography work to date, and I cannot wait for the world to see this film.

Currently, we are in pre-production for the documentary ‘Time Moves Slow.’ Building on the work initiated in my first film ‘The Outlanders – from HKG to SEA’ (which Gabriel worked on as well), ‘Time Moves Slow’ focuses on the creative act and somatic awareness as forms of resistance. It is a particularly exciting project because we’ll be experimenting with multimedia production, and a more intimate and spontaneous approach to capturing what our subjects have to say. I’m incredibly honored to have Gabriel participate as one of the subjects and to have the chance to amplify his voice.

Hyperlinks
Boyslut: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32094603/
Time Moves Slow: https://www.instagram.com/timemovesslowdoc/
The Outlanders – from HKG to SEA: https://www.azurekwok.com/theoutlandersfromhkgtosea-2022

Website: https://www.azurekwok.com

Instagram: azurekwok

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azurekwok

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@azurekwh?si=M0LY5tTi_leO_I_x

Other: IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13623873/

Image Credits
Azure Kwok
Gabriella Jones
Madison Lambert