Tracy Choi Ian-Sin – Windows on Worlds

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)

Looseley inspired by the experiences of star Irene Wan, Tracy Choi’s meandering drama Lonely Eighteen (我們的十八歲) charts the friendship between a pair of women trying to make their way in the ‘80s Hong Kong entertainment industry. Somewhat incoherent, the film positions itself awkwardly in its complicated gender politics while also ambivalent about the heroine’s commitment to her art and the things it may have cost her if also selling a mild message about female empowerment and independence.

Elaine and Ying meet as children, each from poor families and bonding in a shared sense of frustration. While Ying later moves away, Elaine’s family plan to sell her to a wealthy man though this does not appear to actually take place and she remains under the roof of her incredibly moody and abusive father. It’s her father who wanted to sell her and who makes her life a misery, yet the later part of the film will focus heavily on her love for him and guilt that her job prevented her from getting to the hospital in time when he passed away. In any case, after reuniting as teenagers, Ying introduces Elaine to a film producer she’s met through her clubland connections and the pair are signed as fledging starlets at a studio that mainly produces Cat III erotic movies.

The film is very clear on the dichotomy between Elaine, wholesome and transcending her humble origins, and Ying who is earthier and trapped by the bad patterns of her childhood. Elaine soon progresses towards success as an actress, but Ying is somewhat traumatised by being cajoled into full frontal nudity by producer Ben and thereafter unable to shake off the label of erotic actress. Meanwhile she’s also trapped by her relationship with Shing, a guy she met at the club and wants to spend her life with but has a destructive gambling problem that disrupts her career.

In the film’s present day, it’s Elaine (now in her 50s) who is vacillating over marriage and what it might mean for her work as an actress and independence as a woman. Her manager seems to imply she won’t be getting work after the wedding, though her fiancé also seems rather controlling and disapproving of her career preferring she become a stereotypical housewife. It’s this that Elaine begins to rebel against, wanting to rediscover herself as an actress by taking on more challenging work even if her agent would prefer she stick to the commercial, while uncertain if she really wants to get married at the price of her career. The film ends with a fantasy wedding that reechoes the film’s lowkey conservative attitudes as Elaine’s fiancé effectively gives her permission to continue acting but only if she’s “transparent” with him.

Elaine keeps saying that she wasn’t successful as an actress and feels guilty about letting her father down, though she appears to be working steadily and lives in a well appointed home whereas Ying has struggled with mental health issues and now works part time in a supermarket. The pair of them are subject to a hypocritical double standard and the vagaries of a sexist, largely unregulated industry. Ying never escapes the label of erotic actress, while Elaine’s attempt to break out of stereotypical roles in TV drama by agreeing to appear nude in a CATIII slasher backfires and leaves her exasperatiedly explaining that what she’s made is art and not porno.

There are rumblings in the background, mentions of the Handover and the clearing of the slum where Elaine grew up which her father defiantly resists, yet the film can’t seem to find much of a through line or sense of purpose save the implication that the two women’s lives were largely defined by their family background with the perhaps unpalatable suggestion that Elaine used hers to propel herself forward while Ying’s continued to drag her down. Meanwhile, it’s also implied that Elaine’s “obsession” with acting has cost her in terms of her relationships, not only with Ying but not having said goodbye to her father because she needed to finish a scene while also remaining childless and unmarried at a comparatively late age. The resolution may point to her gaining the best of both worlds, claiming happiness on her own terms but also skews somewhat conservative in her fiancé’s chauvinism and the notion that she should be married even if she doesn’t really want to be. Even so, it does gesture at the enduring qualities of female friendship as Elaine and Ying patch up their differences while preparing to move on to a happier future.

Lonely Eighteen screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Tag: Tracy Choi Ian-Sin

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

Lonely Eighteen (我們的十八歲, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2023)