Hits and misses
Herman Yau Lai-to is a man in a hurry - or so says his minder from the Hong Kong International Film Festival. It's 4pm and the publicist is eager to usher Yau to another interview before the filmmaker leaves for the mainland to start production on a new film. 'A quirky movie,' he says.
Despite the busy schedule, time has never been much of a problem for Yau (below). He directed three films last year, worked as a producer and cinematographer on a fourth, has two films debuting at the festival next week and another that has just been completed.
Quantity is not the only thing that sets Yau apart from his peers. Diversity is another. He is at ease hopping from one genre to another. Yau's best known film is The Untold Story, a movie filled with disturbing violence and sex based on the real-life case of a murderous Macanese cook who turned his victims into mince meat. But he also made From the Queen to the Chief Executive, a docu-drama about juvenile offenders facing detention in local jails, and last year's Cocktail, a mild melodrama about the romances of urban twentysomethings.
'I always try my best to turn to something completely different when I finish a film - it sounds like more fun,' says the 46-year-old. 'It's so much better than filming car chases and collisions again
and again.'
But some of his films have certainly crashed. Cocktail was followed by the farcical action flick Lethal Ninja; then there was Over the Edge, a somewhat refreshing take on the undercover-cop-in-danger genre, before his involvement as cinematographer and producer on Dennis Law Sau-yiu's mediocre martial arts film Fatal Contact.
The uneven nature of his work looks set to continue with his next three films: A Mob Story, a lacklustre triads-and-assassin piece, will premiere at the film festival alongside Whispers and Moans, a humane exploration of the tribulations of sex workers in Hong Kong. And the working title of an unreleased film says it all: it's another supernatural thriller called The Curse.
However, Yau could never be faulted for his earnestness. He occasionally captures social injustices in works such as From the Queen to the Chief Executive,
and Rescue Action, a documentary about how the fire services dealt with a fatal car crash in Choi Hung in 1995.
Despite a cast of show business old hands (Athena Chu Yan, Candice Yu On-on) and young pop singers (Yan Ng Yat-yin, Don Li Yat-long), Whispers and Moans can be put into the same category. Inspired by a book of the same name, Yau has crafted a film about a group of prostitutes (from Chu's scorned mamasan to Li's despairing gigolo) gathering at the closure of a once-lavish nightclub. It's an 'industry in the twilight', Yau says, referring to stringent law enforcement on one side of the border and the rise of Shenzhen's nocturnal pleasure domes on the other.
Yau says he wants to do justice to one of society's most marginalised groups. 'There were a lot of films with prostitutes in them, but many show them in a discriminatory light - in the end, those portrayals feed into the oppression they 're being subjected to,' he says.
'I made this film because I want people to see it, and hopefully they'll leave the cinema thinking how we should really look into this marginalised group of people.'
