An Asian Ghost Story is a haunting essay film by Bo Wang, whose practice often blends archival research with poetic, speculative storytelling. The film explores the lingering spectres of Asia’s late-20th-century modernisation, beginning with the 1965 U.S. embargo on “Asiatic hair” during the Cold War. The film moves through stories of factory work, migration, and shifting industrial economies, tracing how wigs – made from human hair – once became a vital export commodity for post-war Hong Kong. Between Maoist China and a Western market hungry for wigs, Hong Kong functioned as a porous gateway, mediating and sanitising exchanges across ideological divides.

Fragments of archival footage, lo-fi aesthetics, séance-like scenes, and poetic narration carry the viewer through a shifting landscape of memory and material. Ghosts appear not only in story but in texture – in the hair itself, in the factories, and in the sense of a city suspended between worlds. Hong Kong’s in-betweenness – between East and West, communism and capitalism, past and present – emerges as a space where clear categories dissolve. Hair’s strange immortality and the repetition of ghost stories offer clues to how histories resurface and endure. As an essay film, the film unfolds less as a linear account and more like a haunted drift, circling through time and space like a leaf caught in its own swirl.

An Asian Ghost Story is part of a larger block on the political-economic transformation of Hong Kong, and its effects.