The Cinematheque

In Person: Ann Hui

“Uncanny … Song of the Exile is striking in the way it parcels out knowledge of a mother’s history as a gradual, lived revelation—at first too close to see, but clearer with the passing years.”

Phoebe Chen, Film Comment

Ann Hui’s most autobiographical film is also her most formally refined, an emotionally layered portrait of familial conflict that counts as the closest connection between the Hong Kong and Taiwanese New Waves. Hueyin (Maggie Cheung) is finishing her master’s degree in London. Surrounded by friends, she’s abruptly invited to Hong Kong for her sister’s wedding, a return that’s both more vivid and more alienating than her adopted English home. Hui, working with screenwriter Wu Nien-jen (who penned Edward Yang’s That Day, on the Beach and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind), constructs an elaborate framework where the past, both as it’s understood by Hueyin and complicated by her mother’s side of the story, almost takes on a will of its own in guiding the film. Hueyin’s odyssey is away from what she knows (from London to Hong Kong to southern Japan) and increasingly closer to her mother’s experience, a specific form of tension that both deepens sympathy and reopens wounds.

In Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin, and English with English subtitles

Followed by a conversation with director Ann Hui, moderated by Helena Wu.

“Song of the Exile is a prime example of Hui’s formidable storytelling skills … Her films have an intimate eye for detail, yet Hui’s scope is invariably epic.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

“Glorious … A delicately crafted autobiographical recounting.”

Bérénice Reynaud, Sight and Sound