Director: Ann Hui
Script: Wu Nien-jen
Cinematographer: Chung Chi-man
Editing: Huang Yih-shun
Music: Chen Yang
Cast: Chang Shwu-fen, Maggie Cheung, Lee Chi-hung
Production: COS Film - Taiwan
Year: 1990
35 mm, Colour, 98 min
OV with French Subtitles
Unreleased
With kind support of Taipei's representative office in Paris
In 1973, having just completed her studies in London, Hueyin goes back to Hong Kong to attend her younger sister's marriage. She meets Alko, her mother of Japan extraction now widow of a Chinese officer. The marriage must be celebrated according to the tradition imposed by her mother, and Hueyin has to follow rules which have no meaning to her any more. She feels she has become a stranger to her own past, her former world is distant and the confrontational relationship she has had with her mother from childhood, is now reactivated. Alko feels homesick for the country she left thirty years ago, and wants to go back to Japan with Hueyin to make her discover her family which once was quite powerful. The mother-daughter relationship is obviously improving while they travel back to their roots.
Ann Hui allows past to surface again and leads her heroine into the nostalgia of her origins to better accept her own heritage.