Hikayat

KAKI KINO | HAMNET
TUESDAY and WEDNESDAY at 6.00pm | THURSDAY at 6.30pm

This is one of the film highlights of the year ... and yes, Jessie Buckley is amazing.

After her son Hamnet dies, aged eleven, Agnes Shakespeare is struck with intense grief. As she mourns with her husband William, the pair struggle to come to terms with the frailty of life and the ruthlessness of the plague. Set in 16th-century England, Agnes, a healer by trade, must find a way to move on with her life and provide for her other children.

Wednesday's screening is full. We still have places for tonight (Tuesday) and Thursday.

Hikayat
226 Lebuh Pantai
George Town
10300 Penang

T: 04 261 9001 (Hikayat)
04 261 8001 (Gerakbudaya Bookshop @ Hikayat)
E: [email protected]

HAMNET - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters This Thanksgiving "A monumental cinematic experience." Watch the official trailer for HAMNET, winner of the 2025 TIFF People's Choice Award. Starring Jessie Buckley and Paul M...

ARTIST'S TALK AND EXHIBITION | KIT CHAN | BOND OR BOUND

We are delighted to invite you to our new exhibition – Bond or Bound by Kit Chan.

Here are the details for your diary.

Opening and Artist’s Talk: Saturday 7 March 2026, 7.00pm

Your chance to see the artworks and meet the artist. Kit will be in conversation with Gareth.

Free admission
Refreshments will be served

The exhibition will then run until Sunday 12 April 2026
Venue: Hikayat, 226 Lebuh Pantai, 10300 George Town, Penang

➽ The exhibition

City life has dulled our ability to sense the old communion between humans and animals. For thousands of years, there was a profound, often spiritual, connection that helped create shared, meaningful experiences. There is plentiful evidence that companion animals can fill important existential needs of humans. And many societies have sought unity with animal spirits via their ritual beliefs for strength and wisdom.

Rapid urbanisation just about everywhere has profoundly changed this communion. Few children now grow up with grass underfoot or the smell of dung in the air, with days shaped by the needs of the land and seasonal rhythms rather than schedules seemingly set in stone. In chasing supposedly higher forms of work and progress, humans have loosened their grip on a relationship that was once instinctive, visceral and unavoidable.

Asia has followed the same developmental trajectory, which has accelerated with unparalleled intensity across recent decades. Across some of the world’s fastest-growing nations, vast swathes of land have been traded for megacities. For the first time in history, over half the world’s population lives in urban areas. It’s a process that causes biodiversity loss, climate crisis, widespread pollution and the diminution of animal habitats. This is the Anthropocene.

And yet Nature does possess the remarkable capacity to adapt. Beyond sprawling cities, the Asian landmass still carries fissures where modernity hesitates, where progress sprouts unevenly, like mushrooms after rain. And even in these urban spaces, many species have adapted their behaviours to exploit these new environments, so that there is a new (sometimes tense) cohabitation and a greater appreciation of urban biodiversity.

It is into these spaces that Kit Chan steps, camera in hand, guided by curiosity and concern rather than conquest or cruelty. Her work searches for something elemental: the fragile, evolving bond between the creatures that give the planet its pulse and the ways development has reshaped human–animal relationship once rooted in necessity.

That bond no longer revolves solely around survival. It has transformed into something more conflicted—human desire set against animal instinct, power balanced uneasily against dependence. Across generations, geographies and moments in time, this kinship stretches, frays and sometimes tears. Are we bonded to the animals we share space with or are they bound by us? When does care slide into control, coexistence into exploitation, and where should the line be drawn?

The images in Bond or Bound do not offer answers so much as quiet confrontations and intimate revelations. Through irony, humour and restraint, Kit Chan has created a visual narrative essential for interrogating what human–animal relations mean today. She captures moments that reveal the uneasy balance between development, modernity and the struggle to preserve life’s most basic meanings, between the wild and the tame, as they play out on the streets and in the overlooked corners of a changing Asia.

➽ The Photographer | Kit Chan

Born in Bukit Mertajam, Kit Chan is a Penang-based freelance photographer who traded a career as a Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking tour guide for the world of long-term travel and photography.

In 2012 Kit embarked on her first truly epic journey—an overland trip from Singapore to Europe, mostly hitchhiking and sleeping in a tent by the roadside, loosely following in reverse Marco Polo’s famous travels in the late thirteenth century. And she took photographs at every step along the way. Many of the images she captured on that trip with her husband, the Italian travel writer and journalist Marco Ferrarese, illustrate the book The Travels of Marco Yolo (2016).

Kit has never looked back. For the past fourteen years, she has maintained that travel bug and captured images in over sixty countries across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South America.

When Kit travels, she is interested in observing what people around her do naturally, and her goal is to document the local life as she sees it—without filters. From snapping photos of novice monks at India’s largest Buddhist monastery in Tawang to the Mongolian camel herders she met in the Gobi desert or chasing alien-like tarsiers in Sulawesi, Kit has captured the difference and breadth of the world—Asia in particular—with stubborn authenticity.

Kit’s photography has appeared in international magazines, including some of the world’s landmark travel publications such as Lonely Planet, BBC Travel, CNN Travel, Rough Guides, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, the South China Morning Post, AirAsia’s Travel 3Sixty, the Guardian and NIKKEI Asia. In 2021 Kit also worked as a photographer for Médecins Sans Frontiéres, documenting the organisation’s work with the immigrant Rohingya community in Butterworth, Malaysia, for their promotional leaflets and image bay.

This is Kit’s second solo photography exhibition after her successful Women on the Road (2024), a collection of a dozen gripping images of a quiet female power she captured across the highways and byways of Asia.

The artworks from the exhibition will be on sale.

Hikayat
226 Lebuh Pantai
George Town
10300 Penang

T: 04 261 9001 (Hikayat)
04 261 8001 (Gerakbudaya Bookshop @ Hikayat)
E: [email protected]