Hong Kong is a city of 7 million people living at full speed. Every square metre is occupied, every hour is loud, and stillness — real stillness — feels like something you have to fight for. That tension is what this film is about.

*Moving* is a short dance film I made in Hong Kong with Claire Lim, a local dancer and resident who wanted to explore exactly that contradiction: what does it mean to find your own pace inside a city that never slows down? Through movement, Claire traces a path through the urban landscape — not escaping it, but learning to inhabit it on her own terms.

Watch the Film

The concept for *Moving* came out of a series of conversations with Claire about what it feels like to live in Hong Kong as a local — not as a tourist passing through, but as someone who wakes up inside this density every day. The city’s energy is real and it’s relentless, and what Claire described wasn’t exhaustion exactly, but a need to find moments of synchrony: mind and body moving together, not swept along by everything around them.

Dance became the language for that. We chose locations that reflected the contrast — Tamar Park in Admiralty, where the harbour opens up and gives you breathing room in the middle of the urban grid, and the tighter spaces where the city’s texture is unavoidable. The idea was always to let Hong Kong be present in the frame, not to find the one clean corner that looks like somewhere else.

The narrative follows Claire’s words closely — the script is drawn from our conversations, shaped around the moments she described most vividly. What you hear in the film is essentially her own language, edited to find the through-line.

The film was shot on a Sony A7R III using the Zeiss Batis lens set — 25mm f/2, 40mm f/2 CF, and 85mm f/1.8 — provided by Zeiss HK and Shriro for this production. Three days on location, every kind of Hong Kong light. The 85mm was the portrait lens for Claire’s closer sequences; the 40mm CF handled most of the movement work where I needed to stay close without losing the environmental context; the 25mm came in for the wide urban frames where the city needed to be part of the composition.

For a dance film, autofocus behaviour during movement is not a secondary concern — it’s the whole thing. The linear motors in the Batis lenses tracked Claire’s movement cleanly and quietly, which matters when you’re recording ambient sound at the same time. Full review of the Batis lenses from this production: Review ZEISS Batis lenses, including the ZEISS Batis lenses – a 25mm f/2, a 40mm f/2 CF, and a 85mm f/1.8.

Director / Cinematographer: Cedric Paquet
Dancer / Subject: Claire Lim
Production team: Aaron Martin, Pamela Gonzalez
Location:Sharedspace Hong Kong
Lenses provided by: Zeiss HK & Shriro

If this project speaks to something you’re working on — a film, a brand story, a documentary — I’d like to hear about it. Get in touch