Meiyou taiyang di rizi
Hong Kong / Japan,
1990, 90 min
Shown in 1990
CREDITS
- dir
-
Shu Kei
- prod
-
Masami Ogahara
- scr
-
Wu Nien-Jen, Shu Kei
- cam
-
Wong Chung-Piu
- editor
-
Sammy Chow
- source
-
NHK Enterprises, Inc., 2-2-1 Jin-Nan Shibuya-ki, Tokyo 150, Japan, TEL: 3-481-1652
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Shu Kei in person.
OTHER
Now that the flood of news reports from Tianamen Square has abated, the time has come for considered reflection on what happened in China last year and its implications for both the Chinese and the rest of us. Hong Kong filmmaker Shu Kei rises to the occasion with this extraordinary documentary feature, which starts from an eye-witness account of the massacre by Duoduo, a Beijing poet now in exile, and then examines the impact of events on Hong Kong and on the growing Chinese diaspora around the world. With positively un-Asian candor, Shu Kei brings the issues squarely back home to his own family and friends, making us privy to some extremely intimate family discussions and to his own changing feelings towards his mother. Pop sociology doesn't come into this; instead of vacuous vox-pop interviews, we are shown intense and moving conversations with relatives and collegues, many of them from the film industry. The film takes us from Hong Kong to Australia and North America—and eventually to the Venice Film Festival, where Hou Hsiao-hsien is interviewed right after winning the Golden Lion for A City of Sadness. En route, Shu Kei throwns alarming light on the processes of unofficial censorship in Hong Kong and asks some provocative questions about the meaning of "Chinese identity." Number One in a field of one, the film confirms that Asian voices on conscience are loud, strong and urgent.
—Tony Rayns
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
