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Film Notes:
SONG
OF THE EXILE
SONG OF THE EXILE (1990, Hong Kong, 100 min., color)
Director: Ann Hui; screenplay: Wy Nien-Jen; producers: Deng-Fei
Lin, Nai-Chung Chou; executive producer:Jessica Liu; cinematography:
Chung Chi-Man; music: Yang Chen; editor: Yih-Shun Hunag; costume
design: Shirley Chan.
CAST: Aiko/Kwei Tzu (Shwu-Fen Chang); Hueyin Cheung (Maggie Cheung);
Hueyin's father (Chi-Hung Lee); Hueyin's grandfather (Tien Feug).
COS Films Co, Ltd/Central Motion Picture Co. In Cantonese with English
subtitles.
Ann Hui is among Hong Kong's best-known directors, and the most
prominent female Asian filmmaker. One of the original Chinese New
Wave directors, she is also one of its most ecclectic, having depicted
a range of topics including ghost stories and the Cantonese opera;
the liberation of Da Nag; kung fu; and more traditional women's
melodramas.
Song of the Exile is her most personal film and the first
to be released in the United States since Boat People (1982).
An autobiographical exploration of a modern 25-year-old woman's
(hueyin Cheung) relationship with her mother, it also probes equally
important questions of contemporary Asian identity and cultural
displacements through the narrative of a young woman raised in part
by Chinese grandparents in Macao during the post-war period. Only
years later does she learn that her mother was a Japanese woman
living in a strange and prejudiced land.
Ann Hui (Xu Anhua in Mandarin) was born in Anshan, Manchuria, in
Northern China, in 1947. Her father was Chinese, her mother Japanese.
She was two months old when her family moved to Macao, shortly before
Mao's revolution in Mainland China. ALthough Macao was under Portuguese
administration at the time, Sino-Japanese conflicts had ended only
two years earlier. Hostilities were still very strong against the
Japanese. Ann Hui's mother did not speak Chinese, and could speak
Japanese with no one except her Chinese husband. When she was five,
Ann Hui's family moved to Hong Kong. It was not until the age of
fifteen that she learned that her mother was Japanese; she has stated
in published interviews that until that time she considered her
mother to be strangely inarticulate.
In 1969 Hui received her BA, and in 1972 her MA in English and
Comparative Literature from Hong Kong University, after which she
spent two years in London Film School. Locations for Song of
the Exile included London, Macao, Canton, Hong Kong, and the
beppu area of Japan, a thermal spa region locatedin Kyushe (Western
Japan); the Manchurian scenes were repeated elsewhere. The lyrics
of the original "Song of the Exile" (an ancient melody
very popular in southern China) describe a lonely traveler who begins
nostalgically to recall his homeland.
Filmography: The Secret (1979), The Spooky Bunch (1980),
The Story of Woo Viet (1981), The Boat People (1982),
Love in a Fallen City (1984), The Romance of Book and
Sword (1987), Starry is the Night (1988), Zodiac Killer
(1991), My American Grandson (1992), and Summer Snow
(1994).
Discussion Questions:
1) "The ones closed to is are always furthest away."
Comment on this statement of the mother to her daughter.
2) In what ways in the film a "woman's picture"?
3) How is the idea and reality of "home" portrayed? Compare
with other films you've seen.
4) Why is the question of home and exile particularly resonant for
people living in Hong Kong before the handover of the city to the
People's Republic of China in 1997?
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