Country: Hong Kong
Year: 1999
Duration: 114'
Ying, a prostitute in Wunan, decides to move to Hong Kong with a short-term residency permit: there, no one knows her and no one – not even the city – knows she exists. In Hong Kong she meets three other people who have arrived from continental China: Yan, a dance teacher who now works an elevator in a restaurant; Jian, Yan’s boyfriend, who works in a store that sells porn videos; and Chun, who services elevators. Between third-rate brothels and deserted karaoke clubs, their lives mingle and take different directions.
Biography
film director
Yu Likwai
Yu Likwai (Hong Kong, China, 1966) studied in Belgium at the INSAS (Institut national supérieur des arts de spectacle), graduating in Film in 1994, and began working as a cinematographer, the start of an important collaboration with Jia Zhangke. He directed the photography of many of the Chinese filmmaker’s movies, including Pickpocket (1997), Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures (2002), The World (2004), Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008), I Wish I Knew (2010), and A Touch of Sin, which won best screenplay at the last Cannes Film Festival. The collaboration between the two artists also led to the founding of the production company Xstream Pictures in 2003. Yu Likwai has also worked as director of photography with the Hong Kong director Ann Hui on Ordinary Heroes (1999) and above all on A Simple Life, which competed at the 2011 Venice Film Festival and for which Deannie Yip won the Volpi Cup for best actress. He recently collaborated on the first film directed by the Chinese author Quan Ling, Forgetting to Know You (2013), produced by Jia Zhangke and presented at the Forum of the last Berlinale. Alongside his work as director of photography, in 1996 Yu Likwai began his career as a director with the short documentary Yuan Ping, followed the next year by the medium-length documentary Neon Goddesses (1996). In 1999 he directed the feature-length Love Will Tear Us Apart, which competed at Cannes, and in 2003 All Tomorrow’s Parties (2003), selected for Cannes in the section Un certain regard, and winner of a special mention for the Photography at BAFICI and the New Visions Award at the Sitges Film Festival. In 2004 Yu Likwai participated in the Jeonju International Film Festival project with the short Dance with Me to the End of Love, presented that same year at the Torino Film Festival, and in 2008 he made what for the moment is his most recent film as a director, Plastic City, which competed at the Venice Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Yuan Ping (cm, doc., 1995), Neon Goddesses (mm, doc., 1996), Tin seung yan gaan (Love Will Tear Us Apart, 1999), Mingri tianya (All Tomorrow’s Parties, 2003), Dance With Me to the End of Love (cm, 2004), Dangkou (Plastic City, 2008).
Declaration
film director
“This is a film about ‘post-Chinese’ Hong Kong. ‘Post-Chinese’ in the sense that in this Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China the Chinese essence has become brittle and emptied of its substance. Migrants by nature, the people here are perpetual victims of a nostalgia from somewhere else. The film sets out to construct a kind of pathology of what it means to be Chinese in my native city.”
Cast
& Credits
REGIA, SCENEGGIATURA
Yu Lik Wai
FOTOGRAFIA
Lai Yiu Fai
MONTAGGIO
Chow Keung
SCENOGRAFIA
Elbut Poon
INTERPRETI E PERSONAGGI
Tony Leung (Ah Jian), Wong Ning (Ah Ying), Lu Li Ping (Ah Yan), Rolf Chow (Ah Chun)
PRODUTTORI
Stanley Kwan, Tony Leung
PRODUZIONE
Hu Tong Communication
DISTRIBUZIONE
Celluloid Dreams
Yu Lik Wai
FOTOGRAFIA
Lai Yiu Fai
MONTAGGIO
Chow Keung
SCENOGRAFIA
Elbut Poon
INTERPRETI E PERSONAGGI
Tony Leung (Ah Jian), Wong Ning (Ah Ying), Lu Li Ping (Ah Yan), Rolf Chow (Ah Chun)
PRODUTTORI
Stanley Kwan, Tony Leung
PRODUZIONE
Hu Tong Communication
DISTRIBUZIONE
Celluloid Dreams