Tag: Cantonese

Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦, Tsui Hark, 1986)

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“There aren’t enough heroes,” the leader of an opera troupe shouts, “quick, those of you who were villains change your clothes.” Only the names change in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦). Politics and history are mere performance in the revolving doors of power. Set in 1913 at the beginning of the warlord era that followed the end of the Qing dynasty, the film is also speaking to a nascent sense of Handover anxiety. As one warlord falls, another rises to take his place. When he too is defeated, the first warlord returns. Meanwhile, our heroes stand still as history happens around them without their consent, longing for an age of democracy which even now has not yet arrived.

As the film opens, warlord Tun (Huang Ha) is carousing with courtesans and boasting about his 28 wives when his soldiers begin to revolt because they’ve not been paid. Tun has lost all his money gambling and decides to flee while the soldiers loot the palace. His downfall both satirises the innate corruption of power and its anonymous nature as he is soon replaced by the governor who can’t believe his luck. The governor is accompanied by his androgynous daughter, Tsao (Brigitte Lin), who has short hair and dresses in military uniforms, and has recently returned after studying abroad. 

Unbeknownst to her father, Tsao is secretly working for the democratic resistance. President Yuan Shi Kai has been borrowing money from foreign banks to finance a bid to restore the monarchy. Tsao knows her father is the broker and plans to steal secret documents to expose Yuan’s corruption and thereby usher in a democratic revolution. Yet she also finds herself conflicted in the necessity of betraying her father knowing that she is the only person in whom she has absolute trust. In the absence of a son, he plans to hand his empire to her, only she doesn’t really want it. To find her new democratic future, she will have to let the old world die and that means letting men like Tun and her father go with it.

Her mission is contrasted with that of Bai Niu (Sally Yeh), the daughter of a Peking Opera troupe manager. Bai Niu’s greatest desire is to be on stage, but women are barred from performing. All female roles are played by men who are also sexuality exploited, essentially pimped out to important people and supporters to ensure the troupe’s survival. Though Tun and Tsao may openly vie for power, the real source of power lies with corrupt police chief, Liu (Ku Feng), who insists on sleeping with the troupe’s biggest star. When he flees, he gives Bai Niu his spot and permission to perform despite her father’s objections, but what she perhaps doesn’t realise is that this “freedom” also traps her with the threat of sexual exploitation, something she is later subject to while assisting with Tsao’s plan to knock her father out so she can steal the key to his safe.

Wandering musician Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), meanwhile, is much more accustomed to using her sexuality to get by and seeks freedom through riches. She wants the money so that she can flee abroad, which is both an expression of a desire for broader horizons and that to escape the chaos of the warlord era. It also, of course, speaks to the present day and those planning to get rich quick and leave Hong Kong before the Mainland takes over. The three women in ways reflect different reactions to the looming anxieties of the Handover, Tsao the revolutionary staying to fight for democracy, Bai-niu holding fast to her family and culture and trying to live through it as best she can, and Sheung Hung who is planning to leave.

They are all, however, at the mercy of circumstance and there’s an essential irony in the film’s conclusion which leaves them all scattered, vowing to reunite when the chaos is over and democracy has been restored, given that this likely means they will never meet again as the promised age of democratic freedom has not yet come to pass. Yuan is exposed, but it makes no difference. As if signalling the absurdity, Tsui flashes back to the laughing face of the Peking Opera performer with which the film opened. Rocketing between farcical humour, the subversive homoeroticism between the women, the grim reality of authoritarianism as Tsao finds herself tortured by the resurgent Tun, and the kinetic energy of the finely crafted action scenes, Tsui finds a genuine sense of poignancy in the futility of of the heroes’ quest. Finally, the best weapon they have is friendship and solidarity in which they protect and save each other while otherwise at the mercy of history being made all around them that they are otherwise powerless to influence.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bird of Paradise (媽樣年華, Wu Chui-yi, 2026)

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Feeling trapped in her marriage to a dull and patriarchal husband, a middle-aged woman finds a new lease on life after taking up pole dancing in Wu Chui-yi’s lighthearted drama Bird of Paradise (媽樣年華). Having lived only for her husband and son, Yeun begins to crave self-fulfilment, yet knows that her new hobby won’t go down too well with her family and is forced to keep it a secret even as her newfound confidence begins to grow.

After realising she’s actually taking the same class as her teenage son’s crush Shan, Yuen ends up using a different name at the studio further compounding the fracturing of her identity and echoing her assertion that pole dancing allowed to see another version of herself that was beautiful, amazing, and free. Ironically, Shan seems to have a lot of the confidence that Yuen has lost and perhaps bears out the advice she receives from a supportive shop assistant that the projection of beauty is largely a matter of conviction. Believe yourself to be beautiful, and others will too. 

Her husband Ming-lam, however, who happens to be Shan’s high school teacher, constantly tries to suppress the new version of herself that she’s becoming. He complains that she’s getting “further and further out of line” by coming home later in the evenings, dismissively telling her that if she wants to gossip, play mahjong, or talk K-dramas with her friends she can do that in the afternoons. Yuen’s making the “wrong” breakfast and going out of sync with the meal calendar seems to signal the beginning of her rebellion as she begins to look for new sources of fulfilment when Ming-lam rejects unscheduled intimacy and otherwise treats her as little more than a glorified housekeeper. Despite criticising her for neglecting her household duties, he later suggests her life is easy with only the need to put a cloth round every now and then as he otherwise provides her with a materially comfortable life while entirely rejecting her emotional needs.

At the school too, Ming-lam is a strict disciplinarian who runs the morning outfit patrol and tells the children off for minor uniform infractions while making his son pretend they aren’t related. During their careers survey, Shan quips that her plan is to marry a wealthy man, and Ming-lam criticises her for a lack of ambition in wanting such an “empty and meaningless” life despite being exactly the one to which he’s condemned his wife not entirely to her will. Shan later turns this criticism back on him, telling Yuen that his need for control over his students is probably a means of compensating for a dull life that he internally resents. 

Yet Ming-lam is really just a depressing embodiment of an outdated idea of masculinity and an obsession with middle-class properness and respectability. He tells Yuen he just wants her to be a “normal wife”, which is to say subservient to him and confined within the domestic space. He genuinely thinks he’s helping his pupils by keeping on the straight and narrow without considering that he’s stifling their the creativity and individuality. When Shan practices her pole dance at school, he sees it only and lewd and bans it in part for “giving the boys dirty thoughts.” He can’t see that Shan dances for herself and resents Yuen’s growing confidence along with her desire for an identity outside of wife and mother. 

Yuen’s free-spirited mother Feng Mei too decides to look for fulfilment alone rather than relying on a man to accompany her to fulfil her late husband’s wish to take her up in a hot air balloon. Though Ming-lam’s sudden change of heart may seems improbable, Yuen’s transformation also reminds him of the romantic young man he once was and that his wife’s happiness is the most important thing. It is not for him to decide what sort of happiness she might want, but only to support her in chasing it. Yuen’s newfound self-confidence begins to improve the world around her, making her home a brighter, airier space rather than one ruled by oppressive routine and encouraging others to be more of themselves too rather than being confined by social expectation or the desires of others.

Bird of Paradise screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Unidentified Murder (UFO離奇命案, Kwok Ka-Hei & Jack Lee Chun-Kit, 2025)

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The line between a prank and a scam maybe be necessarily thin in Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit farcical comedy Unidentified Murder (UFO離奇命案) in which nothing is quite as it first seems. Unfolding with an almost Rashomon-like structure, the film slowly peels back the layers of reality to reveal that pretty much everyone is playing a trick on someone, sometimes rooted in a childish sense of fun, but equally a desire for attention and the money that can be generated from it in today’s attention-obsessed society.

Twenty-five years ago, Kit (Ronald Lam Tsz-Kit) and Mark (Ling Man-lung) went up the mountain with their friend Ho but returned alone. Ho’s disappearance has apparently become a legendary local mystery with the boys claiming that Ho was abducted by aliens, though some seem to believe that their story is either a trauma-born fiction or a deliberate attempt to disguise their role in whatever may have happened to their friend. In any case, the film opens with an attempt by online content creator Man (Renci Yeung) of the “Prank My Boyfriend” video channel to play a trick on her boyfriend Mark by getting an actor, Kim (Peter Chan Charm-Man), to be the retuned Ho abruptly released by the aliens after 25 years. To begin with, this doesn’t seem like a very funny prank and could be crushingly insensitive. One might assume the now middle-aged men are carrying a degree of trauma about the failure to protect their friend, or else if they really were responsible for his disappearance in someway, it could turn out of be a dangerous situation for everyone. 

Nevertheless, Mark doesn’t seem to be particularly phased by Man’s prank and, on fact, sets out of prank her back by getting Kim onside to pretend that he and Kit kill him while planning to move Ho’s body due to the increased interest generated by the incident’s 25th birthday. This doesn’t seem like a very funny prank either, and it’s difficult to deny that this ultimately farcical situation began with a series of very bad decisions especially as this particular stunt is intended to work up to a marriage proposal. Unfortunately, however, nothing goes to plan and when it looks like Kim might be dead for real, the gang get a mysterious text trying to blackmail them threatening to release Man’s video of them murdering Kim online.

Or course, there’s a possibility that this is another prank too, or, to be frank, more of a scam. In this world, nothing really is certain and no one is really who they seem to be. A good friend might be playing a trick on you that could unwittingly be hurtful or insensitive though they may not mean it, while likewise they may be trying to con you out of a bit money to fight their own desperate circumstances. There’s a kind of childishness that underplays most of the trickery like a lie told by a child to get out of trouble that they then have to commit to for the rest of their lives. In this way a trick can become a shared secret, like an alternate reality that binds people together in ways few other things can. Others my be wilfully deceived by watching things like the Stardust Memories channel that purports to show evidence of aliens but may not be completely on the level. To that extent, at least Man’s channel is honest about its intentions even if it’s not clear to what extent Mark is already in on the joke.

Even if you regard it as harmless fun, these pranks too could wind up having devastating consequences and escalating to levels of death and violence all based on a series of misunderstandings. So confusing do things become while out in the mountain forest that Man even tries to grab the gun from a policeman and points it at her friends certain that they’re pranking her only to be shocked when the gun later goes off. But what could have unraveled a long-time mystery and exposed things best left buried or resulted in deadly consequences instead becomes another bonding exercise in which a group of people generate an unexpected friendship though all being in on the joke, each letting the incident end with good humour and no harm done. Filled with farcical comedy and an ironic cynicism the film seems to say that in this world where everything is grift being in on joke might be the only thing that makes life worth living.

Unidentified Murder screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Magic Cop (驅魔警察, Stephen Tung Wai, 1990)

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“Everything must be based on science,” a rather flippant young policeman insists when faced with the unusual investigative methods employed by Uncle Feng, rural cop skilled in Taoist magic. Though sometimes billed as Mr Vampire 5 and starring Lam Ching-Ying, Magic Cop (驅魔警察) in fact features no vampires but instead revolves around a demonic Japanese sect’s attempts to use Taoist zombies to traffic drugs. Uncle Feng is on the case after agreeing to travel into the city to identify the deceased granddaughter of a neighbour.

Much of the film is indeed about the contrast between rural Tung Ping Chau and the contemporary city. Slick policeman Lam (Wilson Lam) is not exactly thrilled to be saddled with Feng (Lam Ching-ying) as a parter, nor is he that keen on hosting him in his apartment. As he shows off to Feng, Lam’s place has a fancy electronic keypad rather than a key and is decorated in aggressively modern style. It has an unusual open-plan layout in which the toilet is housed in a pretend phonebox while the bath is in the middle of the room. As a modern policeman, Lam believes in things like forensics and harps on about the primacy of science. He doesn’t believe in the kind of Taoism that Feng represents and insists there must be a rational explanation for the fact the dead woman apparently died about a week before becoming the subject of Lam’s investigation. 

Even in the city, however, this kind of magic exists in this case wielded by a Japanese sorceress (Michiko Nishiwaki) running a demonic sect. She appears to be a good match for Feng, and otherwise uses a series of ninja techniques while trying to foil his investigation. In using zombies as drug mules, she has after all subverted the Taoist rituals to which Feng ascribes. His old partner on the force, Ma (Wu Ma), suggests that it was his superstitious nature that put paid to his career as an urban policeman. Though adept at solving crimes and catching wrongdoers he gained the reputation for being a “tornado”, creating chaos whoever he went. Lam too is put off by his chaotic nature and is slow to believe that Feng could be right about the black magic and zombies. He describes his investigative techniques as old-fashioned and resents the fact that he disobeys orders. Feng largely ignores him and his assistant Sergeant 2273 (Michael Miu) and acts impulsively, often using Sergeant 2273 as a vessel for his Taoist techniques. 

Nevertheless, Lam is slowly made to come around, admitting that Feng is a good policeman. Despite insisting Feng has no mind for science, Lam concedes that there is no science in this case and it cannot be solved scientifically. He is powerless to solve it alone and must reply on Feng’s Taoist knowledge. Though Sergeant 2273 much more readily accepts Feng as his superior and goes along with his suggestion that the case has a supernatural dimension, Feng favours Lam, while the two police officers bicker over their attempts to date Feng’s niece Arlene (Wong Mei-way) who is excited to be in the modern city having come from the rural backwater Tung Ping Chau.

Though juxtaposed with a British flag in Lam’s flat, Feng is in essence returning something of old Hong Kong to the island which is beginning to lose its identity amid its transformation into a financial centre and capitalist hotspot. That the villain is a Japanese woman heading a demonic sect of corrupted Chinese teachings also hints at a fear of cultural dominance and the threat external organisations pose to Hong Kong through capitalistic colonisation. Thus Feng must marshal all his skills to the defeat the demonic sect even while plunged into a more literal hell surrounded by flames. Only then is the city a safe space he can allow Arlene to explore alone while he returns to Tung Ping Chau in the company of his new disciple Sergeant 2273 making the same journey in reverse. Though filled with zany humour, the film never belittles the Taoism at its centre nor makes fun of Feng for his atypical policing methods so much as suggesting that the modern man Lam must open his mind to a world beyond reason and reintegrate these aspects of traditional culture that are in danger of erasure in a rapidly modernising city.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

We’re Nothing at All (我們不是什麼, Herman Yau, 2026)

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When a bus explodes in the middle of the city on Valentine’s Day, it opens a series of old wounds in Herman Yau’s self-financed state of the nation genre picture, We’re Nothing At All (我們不是什麼). The vision the paints of contemporary Hong Kong is indeed bleak. Radio and television reports talk only of economic downturn with businesses going bust while traditional spaces like wet markets are dying in the ever-changing city. Engaging with the idea of “lam chau” or mutually assured destruction, this is a Hong Kong on the brink of explosion.

Indeed, the bombers justify themselves that there are no innocent snowflakes in an avalanche and that, therefore, everyone else on the bus has contributed to the circumstances that have made their impossible. The largest of these is entrenched homophobia that has seen the two men exiled from mainstream society. Shy sketch artist Ike inadvertently hints at his sexuality in deflecting his parents’ marriage talk by snapping back that he cannot get married in Hong Kong which is another basic right he has been denied. He can only tell his family about his sexuality by writing a note and passing it through the letterbox. When his father reads it, he beats him and calls him a freak, telling him never to come home again. His family do not report him missing, and it seems it doesn’t occur to them that he might have been on the bus. 

Yau uses homosexuality more as a metaphor for marginalisation rather than a topic for exploration in and of itself. That said, it’s clear that their exclusion from mainstream society as gay men contributes to the poverty that otherwise defines their lives. Fai lives in a subdivided apartment and faces workplace exploitation when the construction site he was working at abruptly stops paying its labourers and his attempts to strike prove ineffective. He fares little better after getting a job at a restaurant with a similarly exploitative boss. Ike, meanwhile, is hassled by police while selling sketches with the implication being that law enforcement would rather go after ordinary people for small infractions while protecting the interests of large corporations. 

Ike at one point attempts to take his own life by jumping from a window in Fai’s subdivided flat, but is distracted by someone else jumping from a higher a floor. It’s at this point that Fai turns his anger back on society, asking him what the point of dying alone is and telling him that if they’re going to go, they should drag a few others along with them. Unable to see a way of transcending their circumstances, the two men can only envision freedom in death and stage a rebellion against the society they feel has rejected them.

The film obviously does not condone their actions, it also places the blame on societal and indifference particularly in the ways in which a wealthier middle-class world unsees men like Fai and Ike and prefers to move anything it finds unpleasant out of its line of sight. In the course of the investigation, the police move through an underground world of backstreet clubs where middle-aged women go to blow off steam and ageing sex worker Andrew desperately tries to stay afloat. Even veteran policeman Leung has his frustrations, admitting that he too came close to blowing the world to hell after he was forced out of the police force due to what he sees as an unfair double standard. 

Even so, his claim that he was saved by the love of a good woman reinforces a societal bias and suggests that the only path to success lies in self-repression. Despite his skills, Leung is depicted as something of a dinosaur with his desire to return to a world where smoking at the office was not only fine but encouraged. Aside from one young man, the other assistants mostly ignore him while he clashes with his more conventional colleagues, but in exploring the circumstances that led to the bus bombing, Leung begins to dig into a pressure cooker society and comes to the conclusion there were many such people like Fai and Ike or even himself who find themselves on the brink of explosion.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Cold War 1994 (寒戰1994, Leung Lok-Man, 2026)

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A compromised policeman finds himself caught between conflicting sources of authority in Leung Lok-Man’s action thriller Cold War 1994 (寒戰1994). A kind of prequel to Leung’s Cold War series, the film opens shortly after the events of the second films in 2017 with MB Lee (Tony Leung Ka-fai) being kidnapped amid a possible return to power under a new government. The events echo a case from 20 years earlier in which a prominent industrialist was kidnapped by Triads at the behest of arch kingpin Peter Choi (Daniel Wu).

The irony is the MB Lee (Terrance Lau) of 1994 finds himself in the same position as his nation as the Handover inches ever closer. Caught between the police force, colonial authorities, and Choi, MB begins to look for new ways to protect his men in  the new post-Handover reality, which makes him an awkward stand-in for Hong Kong itself as something distinct from the twin colonial powers of Britain and China. Just the Handover has produced a power imbalance allowing Choi to rise, a change of leadership at the Lo Yuen Triad society has provided an excuse for Tiger to pursue “independence”, which he largely seems to have done through an ill-advised involvement with Choi. 

Tiger is responsible for the kidnapping of KF Wong, the brother-in-law of the influential businessman William Poon (Tse Kwan-ho). The Poons are old an old money family who may have made their fortune doing things not so differently from Triads, but have maintained their privilege through loyalty to the British. All of the Poons have distinctively British Western names and apparently frequent visitors to Downing Street. Now times are changing, however, William Poon no longer wants to do business with the colonial authorities, while KF Wong’s Victoria Redux plan essentially attempts to maintain the conditions of the colonial era. Though he saw him as a successor, perhaps KF Wong’s kidnapping works out pretty well for Poon.

Just as Tiger and MB Lee attempt to break free from parental legacies, William’s son Simon (Wu Kang-ren) burns with resentment that KF Wong has replaced him as the heir to the Poon group while it seems that Wong also married the woman that Simon had been in love with. He then is also looking for a kind of “independence” in escaping his father’s control and taking the family business for himself. Meanwhile, others assume that kidnapping Wong was a means of destabilising the Poon’s economic empire while they attempt to shore up their power in the post-Handover society. MB wants to find Wong not only because it was his case, but as a means of reclaiming a kind of order and clearing his name after the botched operation raises questions about his loyalty.

Loyalty is a question for everyone with the implication that there may be rewards for those “loyal” to the colonial authorities even after the Handover. The film positions the UK as an antagonist then and in the present day as evidenced by a giant spy satellite trained on the island. MB Lee is pursued and constrained by Special Branch and its British investigators who later take his entire team into custody. After the Wong operation ends in failure, MB is courted by British authorities who tell him that they see him as a possible future commissioner if he agrees to remain loyal to the British and advance UK interests even after the Handover. The British actors deliver their lines with docudrama-style realism otherwise at odds with the rest of the film, but adding to a sense of historical veracity to their machinations. Despite his later actions, MB apparently refuses but uses his leverage to free his men and carve out a niche for himself at the OCTB which is, presumably, the third way he intends to pursue in limited complicity as a means of protecting the people of Hong Kong. 

Back in 2017, police commissioner Lau (Aaron Kwok) and lawyer Kan (Chow Yun-fat) remain unconvinced fearing that MB’s file has been tampered with in an attempt to rewrite history while the contemporary city remains shrouded in fog. Much of the film is seemingly a set up for its sequel, but succeeds in sowing the seeds of mystery in probing the complex relationships between local elites and colonial authorities along with the shifting balances of power in the pre-Handover society while providing the impressive, high-octane action sequences the series is known for.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Girlfriends (女孩不平凡, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2025)

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Now in her mid-30s, Lok (Fish Liew) feels as if she were perpetually standing at a crossing waiting for the light to turn green. She made her first film five years ago, but hasn’t been able to make another one since. A producer likes her script, but tells her that with this kind of content they won’t be able to release it in Mainland China or Malaysia, so they won’t be able to recoup their investment. As he says though, the script can always be tweaked and if she rewrote it including a role for an actress looking for a comeback they might be in business.

But Lok doesn’t really want to compromise. Tracy Choi Ian-Sin’s semi-autobiographical Girlfriends (女孩不平凡) is in many ways about the of fear of being railroaded into something that’s not what you really want. After an argument with her girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu), Lok begins to look back on her life in reverse chronological order inching towards the source of her insecurity in her Macao childhood. At 17, she faced intense pressure to conform. As a member of the debate team, she’s tasked with making an argument for something she doesn’t believe in and resents being forced to say what’s expected of her rather than how she really feels. Her parents expect her to go a local university and become a civil servant without really giving her much choice in the matter. The older sister of a classmate, Faye (Eliz Lum) is the first person who asks her what it is she really wants. 

Lok finds herself watching 2004 Hong Kong drama Butterfly and trying to sort out her confusing feelings for Faye while secretly taking the exam to study at a university in Taiwan in the hope of living a freer life, if only for four years. There seems to be a part of present-day Lok that still thinks she’s on an extended holiday and will one day have to return to Macao and become a civil servant after all. She’s incapable of thinking of the future and seems to be mothered, to a certain extent, in all her relationships as her respective partners take on the burden of practical considerations like financial planning. Each time things start to get serious, she begins to back away, even ghosting her Taiwan girlfriend to return to Macao alone without saying goodbye.

Both the Taiwan girlfriend and Bei seem to want move back to Macao with Lok without even really considering if she actually wants to go. This assumption seems to further fuel her desperation and send her looking for an escape route. Returning to Macao with a girlfriend does not seem to be an option for her because Macao represents conventionality and the life she doesn’t really want but still deep down thinks she is unable to escape. Never having fully addressed her lost love for Faye, she lacks the courage to commit or to believe in a long-term future. Her apartment seems to be full of reminders of old lovers, while she remains uncommunicative and insecure. Using sex as a means of avoiding confrontation, she has a tendency to storm out rather than have a conversation and has never fully accepted herself. When her long-term girlfriend Bei starts talking about serious things like marriage and children, she tells her that she wants her to have a “normal” life, as if she were preventing Bei from having one.

Bei is indeed under the pressure of conventionality, nagged by parents who still haven’t accepted her relationship with Lok to settle down and marry a man. Lok’s family in Macao seem to have already accepted Bei as her wife, but still Lok can’t get over the mental hurdle of believing that she has a right to a future of her own choosing. After her script is turned down, she goes to the cinema to see The Lyricist Wannabe and over identifies with a line in which the heroine is bluntly told that if she’s spent all this time waiting and still not got anywhere, perhaps it’s time to consider another career. Her lack of success further deepens her insecurity as Bei practically points out that they do actually need some money coming in, and perhaps they might have to compromise their artistic dreams as an actress and a director under the pressure of living in difficult economic circumstances while planning for their long-term financial future. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but in a way it is. It’s only by looking back over her life and failed relationships and returning to Macao to put her past to rest, that Lok is finally able to stop chasing the ghost of Faye and gains the courage to seize the future that she really wants.

Girlfriends screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Ciao UFO (再見UFO, Patrick Leung Pak-Kin, 2019/2026)

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“Where will I go in this future?” a young man tearfully asks, unexpectedly cast adrift and handed a future he never expected to have with no one to help him navigate this new reality. Speaking from the perspective of the Handover, his confusion hints at a sense of despair falling over Hong Kong, but also echoes through the contemporary society in a place where, as he later says, nothing stays the same, though that might not necessarily be such a bad thing.

Long delayed for a wider release, Patrick Leung Pak-Kin’s Obayashi-esque drama has a potent sense of nostalgia for a lost Hong Kong of the 80s and 90s, but also a hope that, even if the past cannot be reclaimed and we cannot become who we once were, it is never too late to start again or to choose a new path that leads back to who we were really supposed to be. As children, Heem, Kin, Hoyi, and her unnamed little brother were firm friends living on the Wah Fu estate. The fact that they are no longer in touch reflects a sense of displacement amid the rapid economic growth of that later 20th century in which these kinds of apartment complexes fell out of use leaving communities scattered as the housing market escalated to the extremes of today thanks to rampant property speculation. 

The children see the UFO at moment of extreme emotional despair and it gives them only a temporary respite from the terrors of a more adult world. In the mid-1990s, they have all lost their way. Kin (Chui Tien-you) once said he wanted to be an explorer like his father, but is now working several low-paying jobs such as manning a paper stand, selling vacuum cleaners, and acting as an agent of encroaching modernity by setting up home computers for first-time users. He no longer believes in aliens or the UFO, and though he reconnects with an equally melancholy former schoolmate, keeps her at arms’ length and lacks the courage to fight for what he really wants. Heem (Wong You-nam), whose childhood leukaemia has gone into remission, is working as an extra without much of a plan for the rest of his life, because he never expected to have one. He still believes in the UFO and tries to reconnect with his childhood friends amid the X-Files inspired alien obsessions of the ‘90s.

Hoyi (Charlene Choi), meanwhile, who wanted to be a joker making people laugh has been pushed onto a more conventional path as a professional accountant that appears to be making her unhappy, though she’s unable to escape it. While Kin falls victim to stock market mania and Heem Tamagotchi profiteering before joining his brother’s burgeoning real estate business, Hoyi’s straight and steady path would seem to be the winner, though perhaps there’s not so much need for accountants when everyone’s going bankrupt in the Asian financial crisis just as no has the money to buy apartments, which is something Heem’s brother didn’t seem to consider in thinking himself superior to those who got hooked on the stock market.

Several times the three’s path cross, though they do not meet each other and remain locked on their own melancholy paths. Hoyi’s free spirited “hippie” uncle teaches her a classical song written by an ancient poet that he says is about learning to find beauty in loneliness, perhaps sensing her sense of isolation as she wilfully suppresses herself to be the person that she thinks she’s supposed to be including a potential marriage to a man who’s the polar opposite of her authentic self. Austin (Joey Leung) pulls her back to earth when she’s lost in space, which is another way of saying that he crushes her dreams and desire for happiness by telling her to forget about UFOs and concentrate on being a wife and mother after their wedding.

The UFO then comes to represent a kind of nostalgia and the longing for a lost a past, but within that also finds a sense of hope that what once was can be again. It might not be the same, but it’s still there and it’s not too late to turn around and rediscover that sense of wonder in life. The childhood friends eventually reunite and find new solidarity in their shared experience that makes this new reality a little more bearable, even amid its painfulness and irony. The film ends with Hoyi’s brother (Ng Siu-hin) wearing a mask and telling us that it is April 1, 2003, which is the day that Leslie Cheung died, along with perhaps a certain vision of another Hong Kong, but also hints at the SARS crisis that would strike that year along with the more recent pandemic. Perhaps everything is a cycle, but as they say, the end of one thing is the start of another. They haven’t seen any UFOs for a long time and perhaps won’t ever see one again, but the hope remains, and with it the courage to live in this new future whatever it may hold.

Ciao UFO is in UK cinemas from 15th May courtesy of Central City Media.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Waves Will Carry Us (人生海海, Lau Kek-huat, 2025)

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Yao explains to a wealthy couple in Taiwan how they can change their nationality to preserve their wealth, “investing” in another country in order to buy citizenship to a place that has a taxation system that is more advantageous to their circumstances. But the people he’s talking to remark on his accent and after learning he came from Malaysia jokingly tell him that he passes himself off as Taiwanese quite well with the implication being he’s deceived them in some way, while it’s ironic that someone who’s immigrated to Taiwan is helping them “emigrate” from it.

This seems to upset Yao a little bit. Just as it does when he goes to donate blood with some Taiwanese friends, but is refused because he comes from a “high-risk area”. He points out that they might not reject someone from Europe or America in the same way as someone from South East Asia, while this very denial of his blood seems to suggest that it’s not possible for him to ever be “Taiwanese” no matter no long he might have lived there. Any children he might have would not really be either. Lau Kek-huat’s The Waves Will Carry Us (人生海海, rénshēnghǎihǎi) jumps back over a hundred years to ask what really is a “homeland” and what meaning there is in this world of borders and documentation that take questions of identity and belonging out of the individual’s hands.

Yao came from Malaysia, but as a member of the ethnic Chinese community, he isn’t completely accepted there either. His grandfather came as a child from China, but when independence was granted, he was excluded from citizenship applications because he did not speak Malay and risked losing his land and farm as an undocumented person. He had come there with his uncle who dreamed of untold riches in South East Asia, but found only hard work and dire conditions. Before they left, their relatives had performed a ritual which taught them never to become “barbarians” or risk losing their way home. Quan and his uncle keep their hair in pigtails despite the mocking of those around them and are discouraged from eating the local durian fruit which becomes a favourite of Yao’s father. 

Yet when government officers march into his father’s funeral for which his sister has splashed out on a traditional Taoist burial suit, he learns his father secretly converted to Islam and must be laid to rest in the Muslim burial ground having undergone an Islamic funeral. As he says to his brother Cai who is an activist protesting the corrupt government, it is easier to be a Muslim in this society. You can get cars and loans more easily, not to mention have multiple wives. The government officer looks at him with similar suspicion to the Taiwanese couple, claiming that he understands the “Chinese mindset,” and is sick of people who convert to Islam for purely cynical reasons and never practise the religion. This is what you get, he seems to say as he rejects Yao’s attempts to bribe him and confiscates his father’s body.

It turns out that the reason may not have been so cynical after all, but nevertheless the family is forced through the farce of burying a doll in order to complete the Taoist funeral rites without which they cannot really lay their father to rest. Yao’s and Cai’s mad decision to exhume him from the Muslim burial ground is then an attempt to bring him “home,” though the concept is one that’s in other ways constantly shifting. Yao’s niece asks her mother where Yao’s “home” is now, though the answer they come up with is only that home is wherever he is. That the body ends up getting lost is an indication of its statelessness but also a restoration of freedom in being uncoupled from the notion of national identity. 

Still, young Quan wondered if the stars here were the same as they were back home or if they’d travelled so far the ancestors could no longer protect them. Everyone must find a way to survive, Yao’s father had told him, though his brother Cai may think he’s coward for going to Taiwan rather than staying in Malaysia and trying to make things better like he is with the protest movement. The irony is that their father died on Independence Day draped in a Malaysian flag, while they later use it as a bandana to cover their faces when confronting the police as they try to rescue their father’s body only to enter another kind of in between space, if one in which they are freer to claim their own identity.

The Waves Will Carry Us screened as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Pavane For An Infant (搖籃凡世, Chong Keat Aun, 2024)

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While manning the night shift at a baby hatch, social worker Lai Sum (Fish Liew) reads a newspaper article which wonders if progressive gender politics is responsible for a rise in abortions and the abandonment of babies. It’s a sentiment that comes off as a bit rich, given that most of the reasons given on the form that accompanies a child is that it is a result of rape, often of a very young girl by her close relative or another authority figure such as a teacher or a boss. Yet nothing is really being done to change male behaviour in a fiercely patriarchal society which regards childbirth and motherhood as a woman’s duty. 

Lai Sam visits a Taoist priest and pretends to have had an abortion as a means of exposing him. When women like her come and ask for his help, struggling to come to terms with their decision and haunted by nightmares, he drugs and sexually abuses them while recording it all on tape. It’s almost as if he thinks that women like these are fair game, even before accusing Lai Sam of corrupting her maternal destiny and insisting that she’s sure to become a young widow and lonely old woman. Not even everyone at the facility has sympathy with the women who use it, the woman in charge explaining that there is a strict 30-second time limit for changing your mind and that once a woman has placed a child in the hatch it is no longer hers. Despite the pleas of one of her employees, she refuses to look for a woman who ran off after screaming and pleading with them to open the door because she wanted the baby back. Even if she got it, the woman explains, she wouldn’t be able to raise it anyway.

The reason that Lai Sam herself gave up a child six years previously was that her boyfriend refused to take responsibility and then disappeared. She couldn’t afford to raise a child on her own and felt she had no other choice than to put him up for adoption. All these years later, she is still haunted by her decision and continues to look for her son. Siew Man (Natalie Hsu En-yi), a young woman she tries to help, is also haunted by having had an abortion which has left her with suicidal thoughts and nightmares of a baby crying. She too had a difficult home life after her birth father died and her mother remarried. The pair of them run into a birth ritual being conducted by the indigenous community, the leader explaining to them that in their society the birth of a girl is a happy occasion because women inherit property rights, contrasting with a lullaby which laments that a son will care for you when you’re old, but a daughter belongs to someone else once married.

In other ways, the use of the baby hatch signals the division in Malaysian society as those who place their children there are expected to fill in a form stating its race and religion so that it can ideally be raised by the same ethnicity. Lai Sam did not fill in the form, so her son was placed into a Malay family who are raising him Muslim though she is Chinese and are paranoid about the child being taken back. Another baby is given up not only because the father ran out on them, but because the child has ambiguous genitalia. Though the baby hatch only exists because this isn’t a practice that will ever be stopped and at least this way the children are kept safe, the centre faces a huge amount of hostility from religious communities who brand it “Satan’s Ally” and the “Cradle of Sin”, even while each of the women who has made a difficult decision to give up their child sobs bitterly and stares into the hatch until the very last second as they close the door. Lai Sam recalls a teacher who used to tell them to stand under the Bodhi tree if they’d done something wrong. She hasn’t, but she feels like standing under it anyway, which is, the film seems to say, what it is to be a woman living in Malaysia.

Pavane For An Infant screens in Chicago 5th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer