ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 4.

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Cheung Chui-Yung

HONG KONG, May 5 1998 (IPS) - Hong Kong soon will be celebrating the first year of its return to China, but a series of documentary films being shown here reveal the mixed emotions felt by Hong Kong people toward their ancestral homeland and Britain, the former colonial power.

Some of these emotions – anxiety, patriotism, excitement and helplessness – areplayed out on screen in the special movie series marking the anniversary of the handover to Beijing on July 1, 1997.

The documentaries were first shown at the 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival in mid-April. They feature local film stars and directors and include films titled ‘Journey to Beijing’, ‘Questionnaire’, ‘Three Daughters’, ‘Digital Biography of Hong Kong’ and ‘Riding the Tiger.’ Critics gave particular praise to two films – ‘As Time Goes By’, directed by Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan’s ‘Still Love You After All This’.

Hui and Kwan are highly regarded in the international film world. Kwan’s feature film ‘Hold Me Tight’ received good reviews at the Cannes Film Festival. Hui’s is well remembered by critics for her eighties film on Asia’s ‘boat people’, and the her 1995 Asian smash hit ‘Summer Snow’ that dealt with Alzheimer’s disease.

“They (festival films) are not only about Hong Kong, but films about how the meanings of cinema are constructed, how memory is found and how the present is overwhelmed by the past,” said one film critic.

‘As Time Goes By’ and ‘Still Love You’ both take off from the directors’ personal experiences, but succeed in presenting collective portraits of a people who are at once seized by the joy of returning home, and the pain of parting.

‘Still Love You’ was made during the final months of British rule. In it, Kwan looks back at the Hong Kong where he grew up, instead of attempting to predict the future under Chinese rule. He spent his childhood in Shumshuipo, then a typical working-class area. But when he returns years later, he sees proof of modernisation. High-rise, private residential buildings and shopping malls co-exist with pre-war old buildings and first-phase housing estates, presenting a picture of old and new in transition.

Yet the area’s growing affluence is offset by new problems arising from the recent influx of mainland immigrants and prostitution. Kwan soon finds that the pace of life in Shumshuipo has become too fast for him.

The piece comes off almost like a cinematic collage of Kwan’s past works, with excerpts from his previous films like ‘Actress’, ‘Love Unto Waste’, ‘Rouge’ and ‘Yang and Yin’ as well as clips from his stage play ‘Full Moon in New York’.

“This documentary in some ways carries on what I began in my previous work ‘Yang and Yin: Gender in China’,” Kwan explained in a recent interview. “It also has a close relationship with the short play I (made) for Danny Yung’s ‘Journey to the East 1997’ theatre project.”

Kwan said the decision to incorporate excerpts of his past work in ‘Still Love You’ came about because his projects were “rooted in my own memories from childhood: my experience of growing up in a poor family, my feelings toward my parents, my discovery of my own sexual orientation (as a homosexual).”

His emotions and experiences apparently reflected the duality of Hong Kong itself and this shows in ‘Still Love You’. In the film, Kwan repeatedly cites the Cantonese opera ‘Princess Chang Ping’, which a tells of a princess who tries to deny her identity as well as her marriage commitment after her father loses the throne. But her husband finds her out, and the princess then declares, “I deny, I deny, but in the end I cannot deny.”

Repeating the line in a voice-over in ‘Still Love You’, it becomes a metaphor, not just for his discovery of sexual orientation, but for the troubled state of mind of Hong Kong people who overnight have to recognise their identity as Chinese. And despite Hong Kong’s changed status, Hong Kong remains its people’s home. As Kwan’s film says: “Still Love You After All.”

In contrast to the unsettling effect of Kwan’s work, Ann Hui’s film comes off as more relaxed, though as deep and as rich in emotions. Her tale is told through a meeting with some of her college friends in a Chinese restaurant sometime in 1997.

As they sit around the table, the friends chat freely about their childhood: the dilemma of choosing between Chinese and British cultures, between traditional Chinese opera and Shakespeare, between cultural revolution and the age of rock music. Incessant teasing and laughter mark their meeting, but it is obvious that this is no ordinary reunion of friends.

All of them were born in the late 1940s and as teenagers were confronted by the left-wing student movement in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, they had become anti-colonial activists, although they would be disillusioned by Chinese socialism a decade later. By the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China, Hui and her friends, approaching middle age, were armed with a wealth of experience.

While they share a past, the friends have since gone their different ways, and now have different goals and views. Some choose to commit to Hong Kong by deciding they will take part in the May direct election for the new legislature, but some who obviously distrust Beijing say they are ready to pack their bags should the mainlanders interfere with Hong Kong’s affairs.

Director Hui is among those who elect to stay. She says in the film: “I am still curious about what will happen to Hong Kong. I want to make an account of my own witness.” She also tells the audience that her idea of a real Hong Kong person is one who, regardless of ethnicity, has deep roots in the territory.

Someone like her Japanese-born mother, a fact Ann Hui only learned about only when she turned 16. Hui’s mother learned Cantonese when she married a local Chinese, then learned English after visiting a daughter in the United States. These days, Hui’s mother is learning Mandarin, the official mainland language.

“What Hong Kong means to me is not the place, but the people,” Hui said in a recent interview. “To make this film made me reflect on the people I intimately know, and on myself – how I have become the person I am today. So I grouped some schoolmates together to have a chat about our past, especially about our education and our cultural lives.”

“I never have pondered on this before, and it has led to some enlightenment even for myself – our limitations and our strengths,” Hui mused. “I am grateful to have made this documentary.”