Melbourne
It wasn't until Clara Law Cheuk-yiu was asked to introduce her new film, Like a Dream, at the Melbourne International Film Festival this month that she became convinced the label attached to her name at such events no longer applied.
Her name had been preceded by the tag 'Hong Kong filmmaker' since she began making movies in 1987. Now, after more than 15 years in Australia, did she still fit into that category? It was a question she had been asking herself. 'I now say I am a hybrid - I am not totally so Hong Kong, so China, so Australian, I am all of these. It is silly to think you are just one of these because you just are not,' she says.
'Even when I was studying in England and I was thinking about what it meant to be a Hong Kong filmmaker,' says Law, who studied English literature at the University of Hong Kong but then won a place at Britain's National Film School, the first Chinese to do so.
'Now I am in Australia, being exposed to a totally different culture - what does it mean?
'I was introducing the film and thought back over life here and realised how much Australian-ness is in us. Experience consists of many layers and angles and one [of those] is to be exposed to what the country is about here - what democracy is about here, the multiculturalism here which was not in the Hong Kong experience and, of course, the landscape and colour.'
Law says Australia has led to a different way of working for herself and her co-writer, producer and husband Eddie Fong Ling-ching. 'We are concerned about the landscape - the sky, trees, birds and so on, and we would not have thought of that when we were in Hong Kong,' she told the festival audience in Melbourne. 'Our China distributor is saying Like a Dream is too slow - maybe because we are more laid-back in Australia. Although we have returned to a Chinese-language film, we feel there is an Australian-ness in the film.'
The film also marks a new, more intuitive and less analytical way of working for the couple. Red Earth, the short film screening on August 27 and September 4 in Hong Kong as part of the Summer International Film Festival and then in the Venice Film Festival on September 7, illustrates this new aesthetic, Law says. The 21-minute film, mostly comprising stills shot in Hong Kong focuses on a man who has arranged to meet a girl in a Hong Kong hotel, awaiting her promise of viewing a memorable sunset - but, at first, the sun doesn't set.
'We are concerned with how the world is going with climate change and global warming and this short film has this in it, very much so. It is something we feel is very imminent and people need to be awakened to it,' says Law, who believes this is not such an issue in Hong Kong.
Law, 53, was never part of the Hong Kong movie mainstream - she was making dramas when the action genre reigned supreme - but she won critical acclaim. Her third film, Farewell China, made in 1990, won its star, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk, a best actress award at the Torino Film Festival and her fourth, Autumn Moon, won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.
Law and Fong then began spending time in Melbourne, where her parents, brothers and sister had lived since 1985, and in 1995 settled here. The movies which followed, in particular Floating Life and Letters to Ali, dealt with the migrant experience.
Like a Dream is Law's first Chinese-language movie since then. It is billed as her 'return to Asia', but she's not sure she sees it that way. 'Is it really just a return to Asia - what have I brought with me?'
Home now is both Hong Kong and Australia, although she concedes 'relatively speaking I would say more Australia now because of the lifestyle. I don't think the lifestyle in Hong Kong suits us now - the pollution, the food, the space. People are more laid-back here, more friendly and generous, more kind. They have the luxury to be kind.'
Law's mother died in 2000, her father in 2004. For the last month of his life she slept on the floor beside him and then was overwhelmed with grief which only now she realises impacted on her work for the next year. 'Now I can focus totally on my work and I think I will be more productive. With this new way of doing the scripts, more intuitive, we don't want to do so much thinking, just allow it to grow and come out as a whole from your system,' she says.
'We are able to appreciate this huge landscape, and all that it shows us is important. That is one reason why we were so keen to do that short film, because in Hong Kong there is not understanding of this.'
