'I remember rain and I remember watermelons,' says Tony Ayres, attempting to recall his life before he migrated to Perth, Australia in the 1960s. 'I was three years old when I left, so I don't have many memories of Macau but I recall the vivid colours - the most amazing greens. And I remember the ferry.
'My mother worked in Hong Kong three days a week and she would come back to Macau the rest of the time. I remember running to meet her at the ferry.'
Ayres' recollections of his mother and his childhood are the subject of his award-winning second feature film, The Home Song Stories. It tells the story of Tom (played by actor Joel Lok), his sister and their mother, a glamorous but emotionally fragile nightclub singer.
They leave Hong Kong when Tom's mother (played by Joan Chen) marries an Australian sailor, 'Uncle Bill', only to leave him within a week of arriving in Perth. She drags the siblings around Australia, from one dingy set of digs to the next, while she works as a singer in Chinese restaurants. The children cope remarkably well with the ever-changing scenery and their increasingly deranged mother.
It's an intelligent, sensitive and engaging film. 'Many of the major events from my child-hood are in the film,' says Ayres, 'but my life was more melodramatic and chaotic than that. I had to tone down some of the drama.
'[My mother] was very unstable ... a difficult character but she was also very compelling. The film helped me meditate upon her and, with the help of Joan Chen - who's such an amazing actress - I came to understand my mother better. When I talked to Joan about what motivated her characterisation and how she perceived my mother, it helped me contextualise my mother's psychology.
'When you lose a parent at an early age, your memory of them and your emotional responses remain those of a child for a long time. Now, I can understand she had her own dilemmas that we didn't know about and wouldn't have understood anyway.'
