FULL marks to Pearl tonight for timing. The station is postponing Capitol Critters for a week and replacing it with a documentary on the making of Chen Kaige's controversial film Farewell to My Concubine (9 pm) which has just opened in Hongkong.
The film deals with homosexuality, still a taboo subject in mainland China, and director Chen only learned last week that the Chinese authorities have approved its being shown there.
Former Canto-pop star Leslie Cheung and mainlander Zhang Fenyi play two Peking opera stars who meet in 1920s and form a strong friendship. As their relationship changes and grows with them, their lives are suddenly taken over by more powerful events, with the arrival of the Japanese, the revolution and the Cultural Revolution.
For Chen - whose last film Life on a String did not get past the censors - and for the Chinese movie industry in general, the authorities' approval of Farewell to My Concubine is a big breakthrough.
* * * * AIDS is the subject of As Is (World 11.45 pm ORT 84 mins), a 1986 TV adaptation of a Broadway play which to some extent has been taken over by increased awareness of the disease - though, sadly, many of the attitudes towards its victims have not changed at all.
As Is documents the worsening phases of AIDS, as a hospice worker (Colleen Dewhurst) relates her experiences of working with AIDS patients from diagnosis to support groups and finally to a lonely death.
Robert Carradine plays a rich homosexual writer living in New York who discovers he's contracted the disease. His life is abruptly turned upside down as both his lover (Jonathan Hadary) and his best friend (Joanna Miles) spurn him, and his brother (AllanScarfe) hesitates to come into contact with him.