Honorable Mention in the category « Documentary »

Gold Mountain Dragon is a photographic journey to South China, the homeland of my great-grandfather, who migrated to Australia during the Gold Rush to what Chinese migrants called “Gold Mountain”. The project follows my return to the landscapes and communities from which he departed, seeking to reconnect with a cultural inheritance that became obscured across generations. Like many early Chinese migrants, his life in Australia unfolded within hardship, racial hostility, and the exclusionary structures that later hardened into the White Australia Policy. Over time, language, traditions, and stories were muted through assimilation, silence, and social pressure. Through photographs of ancestral villages, cultural spaces, and contemporary life in South China, the work becomes both a personal search and a broader reflection on diaspora. The images explore how cultural identity can be suppressed yet never entirely erased, revealing the quiet persistence of memory, heritage, and belonging across time and distance. The entire project is shot on 35mm film.