SHE has excelled in films about ordinary lives and ordinary people, so it is to be expected that Ann Hui On-wah would eventually get around to another stratum of society - the 'ordinary heroes'.
Hui's latest film, by that very name, takes an honest, stark look at the lives of these heroes: in her view, the political activists who have striven for their ideals at the expense of the materialism that Hong Kong pursues so avidly.
But despite the political overtones of such a story - the film ends significantly on June 4, 1989 - Hui says she is not posing any political questions about Hong Kong's future under Chinese rule.
'What questions? People just think I do, I really don't!' Hui protested with a laugh. Ordinary Heroes is more a story about the ambivalence of Hong Kong people torn between two allegiances in the 1980s, she added.
'. . . shortly after the events of June 4, 1989, and in the wake of the 1997 handover, I felt a great necessity to express my feelings about Hong Kong and its people: a kind of unnameable mixture of excitement, trepidation, despair, disillusionment and helplessness,' she wrote in a flyer distributed at the Berlin Film Festival where the film premiered.
Hui found the vehicle for her expressions in 1992 when she saw a newspaper report about a 25-year-old street-sleeper who had been beaten to death.
