Clara Law Cheuk-yiu says she can't remember when she last saw her 1995 drama Floating Life, but she can vividly recall the responses of audiences at festivals around the world.
'I travelled through a lot of countries with the film, and I was approached by Scots, African-Americans and Italian-Australians, saying how the film seemed to be talking about their families,' says the Macau-born, Hong Kong-raised Law from Melbourne, where she has lived for the past 15 years. 'This film is not exactly autobiographical - there are characters who are in their teens, their 30s and their 60s. [It looks] at their circumstances [as immigrants in Australia]. It covers a broad range of experience.'
Revisiting Floating Life now, it's not hard to see why film critic Stephen Teo, the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, describes the movie as 'some kind of turning point in Australian cinema' in an essay for the online journal Senses of Cinema. According to Teo, it was the first Australian film 'by an Asian immigrant filmmaker that featured Asian immigrants, dealing with their problems and their experience in settling down in Australia'.
The film was seminal because of much more than that. Deviating from the convention of basing immigrant stories around young people, Floating Life centres on an elderly couple (Edwin Pang and Cecilia Li Fong-sing) who leave Hong Kong to join their daughter, Bing (Annie Yip), in Australia, where she has been living for years and now leads an apparently cosy, suburban life.
But all is not well: beyond the film's initial comedic culture-clash scenes, Law explores how cultural dislocation shapes and contorts the human psyche.
While the pensioners struggle with their traditional values in this new environment, Bing teeters on the edge of neurosis, overcome with anxiety and loathing for her new country. The couple's eldest daughter, Yen (Annette Shuh Wah), also despairs over her life in Germany, while their son, Gar-ming (Anthony Brandon Wong), who remained in Hong Kong, is uncertain about his impending departure to join his parents Down Under.
The film ends with a glimmer of optimism; Law now calls it the 'happiest' of her migration films (her first was her student film in Britain, They Say the Moon is Fuller Here) 'They find the possibility of laying down roots and also some meaning in their lives,' she says.
