WHO WOULD WANT to be an independent filmmaker in Hong Kong? Measly funding and conservative distributors, coupled with a completely crass mainstream industry (producers admitted last week they were censoring such subjects as extramarital affairs and even ghosts in a bid to crack the mainland market), mean indie directors must climb a mountain to find a niche.
And while Yau Ching is determined to reach that summit, doing so with a movie about lesbian love, pornography and social decay is tantamount to scaling Everest in flip-flops. Nevertheless, she is defiant.
'The mainland is going to see this film,' declares Yau.
Despite garnering acclaim at film festivals across the world, it has taken Yau more than a year to find a mainstream outlet willing to screen Ho Yuk (Let's Love Hong Kong). An erotic sci-fi fantasy filmed in digital video, it casts a searching gaze at Hong Kong through a tale of lesbian love.
Yau pans across a neon nightmare of overcrowded streets and apartments, fast food and emotional paralysis. With technology transforming daily life into a cyber netherworld, the real and the virtual are blurred in her portrayal of three women attempting to seduce each other. The film stars Wong Chung-ching, Colette Koo, who runs the club Drop in Central, and Erica Lam, whose performance garnered a supporting actress nomination at last year's Golden Horse awards in Taiwan. Yau describes it as 'the first movie ever made in Hong Kong by a woman, with women in love with each other as the theme'.
She joins a list of local indie directors whose films are characterised by an acute sense of alienation and yearning for self-fulfilment against a backdrop of sexual frustration and broken homes. And Yau has caught the imagination of cinemagoers worldwide, scooping the International Critics' Award and the Grand Prix for Fiction at Portugal's Figueira Da Foz International Film Festival, as well as nominations elsewhere. When it comes to Hong Kong, however, distributors simply do not want to know. It has taken 12 months to get a week's screening at Hong Kong's most left-field cinema house, Broadway Cinematheque.
By day, the 37-year-old filmmaker is known as Professor Yau Ching to media students at the Polytechnic University. She had studied comparative literature and philosophy in Hong Kong before going on to film and media arts in New York and London. During that time she experimented in both, with her short films winning awards at festivals such as the Image Forum in Japan and the Ann Arbor Film Festival in the US, while her multimedia installations were exhibited at museums such as New York's Guggenheim. Despite such global achievement, she chooses to stay in Hong Kong.