Fringe benefits

Laughter in the darkness

The theme of healing runs through strands of the 2026 festival. In the aftermath of the Tai Po fire tragedy, which rocked the city in November, the Hong Kong Music Therapy Association was invited to present three workshops integrating mindfulness and music.

Closing the festival on Feb 15, Chinese Canadian artist Senaida's Like Water, Like Clouds promises an improvised audiovisual ritual inspired by the qigong. The piece makes use of Tibetan singing bowls and a custom-designed paintbrush instrument to translate calligraphy into sound, inviting audiences to "experience softness as a radical act", according to the program notes.

Meanwhile on Feb 8, celebrated soprano Yuki Ip is joined by Fung and pianist Nancy Loo for a musical program of "healing songs" titled Embracing Brokenness. Ng says that the show invites audience members to find hope amid "broken pieces".

At HKFF's press launch, comedians Vivek Mahbubani and Mohammed Magdi led a talk titled The Healing Power of Laughter, exploring the power of humor as a source of resilience and strength. "Laughter is basically something every human being enjoys and is able to do," says Mahbubani. "At the end of the day, if I'm able to make you laugh, it doesn't matter what our skin color is, what our language is, what we look like or what our gender is. We just connected — that's the power of laughter."

In that spirit of inclusivity, on Feb 13 both comics perform in Backstage Comedy's The Big Beautiful Lineup Stand-up Comedy Show, a multi-headliner spectacle that Mahbubani describes as a "comedy buffet", deliberately concocted to help newbies discover their preferred flavor of humor.

"It's just like music — some people like jazz, some people like classical, you can't say which is right or better," he says. As such, they handpicked a diverse bill of performers. "So hopefully one of them will ring a bell with you and make you go, 'Oh, turns out I like that comedy after all!'"