“The more I think about writer-director Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, the more it seeps into my muscles and my bones … This film breathes the slow cinematic air of Tsai Ming-liang … A soulful and passionate meditation on loss.”

Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

The debut feature of Chinese American writer-director Constance Tsang delivers a delicately wrought portrait of working-class sisterhood in New York’s immigrant enclave of Flushing Chinatown. Amy (Wu Ke-Xi), Taiwanese, and Didi (Haipeng Xu), Mainland Chinese, share a closeness that alleviates the drudgery and commonplace abuses of their jobs at a massage parlour. Didi dreams of one day opening a restaurant in Baltimore, where her young daughter resides, and has started seeing lonesome married man Cheung (Tsai Ming-liang collaborator Lee Kang-sheng), a Taiwanese labourer also dislocated from family. When violence suddenly transpires—cleaving the film into before and after parts—the perspective shifts, darkness sets in, and one character’s story subtly substitutes for another’s. Sensitively rendered in 16mm by former Vancouverite Norm Li (Seagrass, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open), this assured and quietly affecting first feature earned Tsang the French Touch Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week.

In Mandarin and English with English subtitles

“A quietly gripping portrait of grief and displacement … Blue Sun Palace​’s tale is filled with quiet spaces, and the way the texture of this quiet changes over the course of the film is a testament to its power.”

Ross McIndoe, Slant Magazine

“[An] observant, lovely feature debut … Tsang’s quietly revelatory scenes hint at the layers of loneliness and despair within her characters.”

Tim Grierson, Screen International
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