Village Crier
Third time’s the charm for Ho Chung filmmaker Tsang Tsui-shan on her latest trip to her home village.
winter Chants
Director: Tsang Tsui-shan • Writer: Tsang Tsui-shan
Hong Kong • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong March 14 • IIB
Grade: B
It’s entirely normal, almost banal, for filmmakers to create brands for themselves. Martin Scorsese’s been accused of making the same film since Mean Streets in 1973. No matter the “when”, Wong Kar-wai has one speed: sultry restraint. The less said about Wes Anderson’s twee fetishes, the better. So Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan is in pretty good company with her brand, which is rooted chiefly in exploring the idea of home, disconnection and belonging, particularly as it pertains to her hometown, Ho Chung Village in Sai Kung. Along the way she’s provided a stage for one of the many, less steely facets of Hong Kong.
Back in 2011, Tsang dove head first into the concept with Big Blue Lake, a classic prodigal child returning story, except it was one about a daughter instead of the standard son. Come 2014 Tsang ditched narrative for documentary with Flowing Stories, which explored Ho Chung’s 500-year history and the changes the modern world imposed on it, including the habit of driving villagers away. It was the kind of personal, subjective work that can only be made by someone possessed of insider knowledge. Flowing Stories unfolded against the back drop of the decennial Tai Ping Ching Chiu Festival, and in her follow-up, Winter Chants | 冬未來, she goes back to Ho Chung for more about that. Aha! But 10 years after 2011 was, roughly (given the Lunar calendar), 2020. We know what happened next. Tsang’s quiet, contemplative tone, unfussy images and ordinary lives are not to everyone’s taste, but if you saw Flowing Stories, the third in the unofficial trilogy is a must.
2020 all over again
The Daoist Tai Ping Ching Chiu Festival is best known for being the inspiration of Cheung Chau’s annual Bun Festival. It’s such a “thing” it’s listed on the HKTB website as an attraction. That is most definitely not how it’s viewed in Winter Chants, not by Tsang, and not by any of the subjects she and her skeleton crew – a sound recordist and her cinematographer Jam Yau Chung-yip – follow for the year of the festival’s planning. Among them are an elderly woman, Granny, who’s spent most of her life in Ho Chung, the village chief, Cheung, doing his damnedest to find enough money to mount the festival, twin brothers who put paid to the idea millennials don’t give a shit about history, heritage and tradition, a Filipina domestic worker who’s trapped in isolated Hong Kong, and a gwaipoh whose husband hails from Ho Chung. None of the 20-plus members of their scattered family can make it back.
And that’s the story. Key to Tai Ping Ching Chiu is reunion and re-connection, and as an event that rolls around once every decade, it’s a time for the Ho Chung diaspora to come back together. But in 2020, when the ’rona raged and the borders closed, that couldn’t happen. That backstory renders Winter Chants a bittersweet ode to village life and resilience, and a melancholy love letter to the village and the traditions that define it.
One of the great ironies of Winter Chants is that the festival about peace, harmony and connection was so fundamentally disconnected that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy; it proved how crucial it was to keeping everyone connected. Of course, the festival was smaller, less grandiose than in previous iterations, and everyone had to keep their distance. But the isolation within isolation proves to be the glue that keeps it all together. The community feast is also scaled back, but a bunch of monitors and a Zoom meeting never felt so meaningful. None of us needs another COVID movie, but Tsang has pulled off the impossible: she’s made a COVID movie that makes a point about our collective sense of home, family, community and the ties that bind – no matter how many of us may pooh-pooh those notions. For all its introspection and melancholy, Winter Chants ends on a hopeful note (despite a few deaths and departures) that suggest Ho Chung will endure – and we should probably expect Tai Ping Ching Chiu business as usual in 2030 or thereabouts. — DEK